Customer Reviews

501 Hebrew Verbs : Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses in a New Easy-To-Follow Format alphabetically Arranged by Root

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an excellent source that I consult almost daily. Putting the biyanim all together fully declined, AND providing examples in everyday conversational Hebrew make the book an absolute joy to consult. As a study aid in the car every day, I photocopy one verb and study it for 1-2 days (I have an hour commute each way, and don't worry, I keep my eyes on the road). I go through each binyan and repeat the verb forms over and over until they stick. I then use the sentences provided with these verbs to make them more meaningful. Two small recommendation would be to add the nekudot (vowel diacriticals) to these sentences to help out beginning/intermediate students, and make a real durable cloth edition--I'm probably going to wear this out. All in all, if you love Hebrew, and you want to be fluent, BUY THIS BOOK for your Hebrew reference shelf!

Put simply, this is the book you need to master the Hebrew verbs.

This is not a beginner book. If you don't know anything about Hebrew verb classes, I would learn about them first before getting this book. For reference sake, I took a 2 semester college level Hebrew class and we didn't really use this book till the second semester. But it is hard to imagine where I would be without this book.

The book is primarily targeted for Modern Hebrew but many Biblical words appear here also. All the verbs are pointed! The book also supplements with some of the more "classical" forms (such as some of the different endings in the perfect tense). Infinitives and imperatives are also given. If there is anything you need on a given root, you will find it here. The end of the book also has a nice page lookup of all the verbs and in Hebrew and also in English.

The book tends to add vavs and yodhs where they may not be needed from a Modern standpoint. Sometimes you can just write the holam hasser (the upper dot) or the holam (dot with the vav); they really mean the same thing in Modern Hebrew. In general the book always writes out all the letters, which is annoying since in modern Hebrew this is not always commonplace. But you get used to it.

There are some problems. Somehow inexcusably the book pages go from left to right ... Some of the letters pairs(such as shin/sin) appear together and are not separated; this is actually not so bad if you aren't sure which it is, but it was very confusing until I figured out what they did. And the publisher should have his\her head examined for the atrocious binding; you will find yourself flipping through this all the time and the book doesn't lay very flat.

This is one of those books that won't help you in the beginning of your studies but it will really help you improve your Hebrew once you know some verb basics. Absolutely indispensable.

201 Hebrew verbs is much better organized, also it clearly gives every form in which the root is found, in the standard order of the forms. This book gives only some of the forms, and in descending order of frequency of use. It leaves out the rarer forms such as pu'al. Also, it uses far to much full (plene, or malei) spelling for a book with vowels.

If this book had followed the format of Barron's first Hebrew verb book, 201 Hebrew Verbs, it would have been great. In that work, every verb was clearly spread out over two facing pages. You could see every possible form of each verb all at once, and for each verb, you could always tell on which part of the page you would find each conjugation, since it was the same for each verb.

This book has only one advantage, and that is the higher number of verbs. It is lacking in clarity and organization. I am a Hebrew teacher since the 70's, and have always used 201 Hebrew Verbs with my students. This book, 501 Hebrew Verbs, would be useless for my students. I can barely follow it myself.

I would strongly recommend that Barron's consider a revision... keep the same verbs, but arrange them the same way the previous book did.

This book has several annoyances. Rather than elaborating on the issues already reviewed (lack of pu'al for example). I have two big complaints that impact the usefulness of the book.

1. A lay-flat binding!

2. Ordering the pages following Hebrew convention (right to left) particularly in the index would be an improvement.

Other than these minor annoyances the book is a great resource for mastering the binyanim of the common forms. One feature I do really like is that it gives the governing preposition of the verb.

On the whole, I use this book as much if not more than I do the dictionary. The reason is simple: you get the shoresh and the binyan with every single verb, a must in a university level Hebrew class. This book probably won't be much use to the beginner (it's real value lies with the shoresh and binyan/gizrah, and, to a less extent, with the past and future conjugations of the verbs). However, if you ever plan on getting past the bare bones basics (i.e., if you want to be able to say more than "Shalom" and "Ayfo ha Mesahdah?"), then you will want to pick it up. The reason I gave the book four stars is that it was written left to right as opposed to the more correct right to left. However, while this is quite unnatural, it can be overcome.

This is a wonderful book, and one that I use often. I am fluent in Hebrew, but I find the example sentences most useful, and the fact that the author has gathered under each root the related words belonging to that root.

Anybody who has studied Hebrew is familiar with the standard books of verb tables which fully conjugate a small number of example verbs, and leave the rest of the work, thumbing back and forth matching numbers and lists, to the student. This book FULLY declines 501 verb roots, or several thousand verbs, in alphebetical order. Asside from the fact that the book presents answers rather than puzzles, my favorite part is the example sentances given for each verb, which go a long way to clearing up what the binyanim actually mean. I'd suggest this book to any Hebrew student.

Unfortunately, these 501 roots do not account for every root in the Hebrew language, and there is no index or table that allows for comparison of roots that do not occur in the volume to those of an identical conjugation pattern that are found in the book. I have not looked at 201 Hebrew verbs, but I have used 201 Arabic Verbs. In 201 Arabic Verbs, an index of verb patterns lists all of the various patterns of irregularity in verbal conjugations and gives example verbs that conform to these patterns that are found in the book. So if I need to find out how a verb is conjugated that is not listed in the book, I turn to the index and look up the particular form (binyan) and which type of irregularity it has (ain-yod, for example) and I get a list of verbs that follow that pattern. I can then conjugate the verb that I need like one of them. Now since the presence of pharyngials and doubled consonants do not cause irregularities of conjugation in Arabic, there are certainly many fewer irregular verbs than in Hebrew, but I can't imagine that such an organization would be impossible. If anyone can tell me of a Hebrew verbal conjugation book that is organized like 201 Arabic Verbs, please let me know.

I am several months into seriously trying to learn Hebrew, at the point where I need to expand my verbs and get a better feel for conjugational patterns. There's one helpful Hebrew Verbs website, but other than that, full conjugations of a wide range of verbs with the vowel markings to guide pronunciation is nowhere to be found.

But yes, I broke the binding the second day -- it seems to be holding up to constant use, but you have to lay something heavy across it to keep it flat while you're reading.