Where to learn Hebrew?
Where to learn Hebrew? It can be frustrating to go to services and struggle to follow the reading of the Siddur because it is in Hebrew. However, with a little time and effort, it is possible to learn to understand the Jewish prayer in Hebrew. And it isn’t necessary to invest months of your life in the effort—you can learn a Hebrew word each day in just five minutes with a professional teacher online.
EranShorr.com offers where to learn Hebrew. It is online, with up to five-minute video lessons, which clearly teach the letters, pronunciation, meaning, and origin of one word in Hebrew at a time. The words are written out in Hebrew, transliteration, and spoken with the teacher’s voice, so that understanding of the pronunciation is easy and memorable. The words are then used in the context of a familiar prayer from the Siddur. As a participant, you are able to ask questions and interact with the teacher—an optimal learning environment. Sessions will be recorded and posted online, so that you can review at any time of the day.
Through the program, you will soon be able to recognize the Hebrew letters, sounds, and vowels. You will see how the Hebrew root word is combined with Hebrew prefixes and suffixes. And finally, you will know the meaning of more and more words in the Jewish Prayer Book, so that you can read the words of the Bible in its origin language.
Hebrew, the holy language of the Jews, dates back to the 10th century BCE, and yet as a modern spoken language, it is fairly new, like the state of Israel. In the mid-19th century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda began working to revive Hebrew as a spoken language. This movement was known as the Haskala, or Enlightenment. The revival of Hebrew was an integral piece of the national revival movement of the Jews, which became known as Zionism. Today, the Jewish people in Israel are united by Hebrew. The holy language has become an everyday language, and yet it does not lose its religious significance. In this way, the lives of the Jewish people, and the writing of the Torah, are intricately linked.
Only around 200,000 individuals in the United States speak Hebrew, and thus it is difficult to learn the language in the US. Many Jewish youth learn to pronounce the Hebrew letters as they work towards their Bar or Bat Mitzvah, but most cannot actually understand the words that they read aloud. And yet to truly engage with one’s religion, it is important to understand the words of the prayers. The Torah was not written for wrote memorization. It was written to be studied and discussed, to be questioned and thought over, to be applied to the lives of the Jewish people. To truly understand the Torah, and apply it to one’s life, one must learn the holy language in which it is written.
Where to learn Hebrew? Language learning is a difficult and often seemingly insurmountable process. But with just one word a day, EranShorr.com makes learning Hebrew feasible and simple to integrate into our busy lives.
For more information, go to Jewish Prayer In Hebrew
where to learn Hebrew?
Where to learn Hebrew?
Wed, Aug 15, 2012
Hebrew, Hebrew Topics - Articles