Customer Reviews

Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar (Essential Grammars)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I LOVE the example sentences Prof. Glinert uses to illustrate each point. They are so conversational, I feel like I'm back in Israel. I've looked over quite a few grammar books in various languages with b-o-o-o-o-o-r-i-n-g example sentences, and this book is such a refreshing change. Also, it is concise and not too exhaustive, so that it makes easy reading, but covers the most important points.

This book proved to be quite a help to me while I was studying Hebrew. The explanations are clear and concise which make it easy to comprehend. In future editions it might be more appropriate to have the exercise answer key in the back of the book rather than having to order it from London direct. The price of the book may go up a bit because of this, but everything would be in 1 complete package.

This edition of Glinert's book was a wonderful surprise. As a mostly self-taught learner, I always want a book that offers exercises with an ANSWER KEY, because I want to practise what I've learned -- but I need to know if I'm making mistakes or not.

For some reason, that seems to be a lot to ask. It's just amazing how many perfectly good textbooks appear to assume you will have a teacher, and that giving you a key to the exercises would only help you "cheat" in class. (As if that would be a wise thing to do!)

This book is amazing. In addition to very up-to-date and colloquial usage (a nice change from the usual hoary old Biblical, archaic, quaint passages), this book sets out the modern spoken language in crystal-clear detail, step-by-step, starting from the very basic and working towards the more complex. The author has done a first-rate job of making sense of it all.

I always think that, given that even small children and very stupid people somehow manage to learn their native language quite fluently, if a book on the language makes it look like a very complicated and tricky process, then that means the book should be tossed aside.

Every language book should make language learning simple and straightforward. It should NOT present the language as a complex challenge to the learner, who will have to be a post-graduate student in linguistics to be able to follow it.

This book merits every single one of the five stars I give it, since it is by far the clearest exposition of the language I've yet seen.

I found this concise grammar to be extremely accessible and helpful after having completed a couple of years of Hebrew at university. I continue to come back to it for refreshers.

If you don't know any Hebrew yet, or you know very little, this book is not going to teach it to you. Spend some time with a good book-and-tape set, take a course, then buy Glinert.

I recently put this book to the test. I used it as a reference while attending ulpan in Israel. It was very useful up to a point.

The major grammatical categories are all covered in the book. It even covers some of the more advanced concepts like the subjunctive mood or expressing "I used to..." type things. I like the presentation of the "maverick verbs". Construction of the binyanim could have been more clearly presented. It is all there, just not organized in the best way.

The only thing is that the book should have gone into a lot more detail on the use of prepositions. I ended up have several questions that I could not find the answer to. E.g. What is the distinction between l- and 'el when indicating the direction of action? When is b- used instrumentally vs. the direct object marker? Why is etzel+pronominal suffix used as a locative noun?

The book is a good value, with a lot of information at a reasonable price.

this is a great reference book to modern hebrew. "fresh and accessible" is what it says on the back of the book, and this is exactly how i'd describe it. there are only 104 pages worth of grammar in this book, but in that space it manages to convey all the important aspects of hebrew as it's spoken today -- i.e. making clear the differences between the textbook hebrew you find in many grammars, and actual usage. it's very well organized and the examples are colloquial and quite entertaining [e.g., section 62 on generic plurals -- example sentences are "i hate cockroaches" and "vacuum cleaners always go wrong"].

Like other books in the Routledge "Essential Grammar" series that I've come across, this book is well-written and covers immediately useful aspects of the grammar of the language. I am particularly impressed by the author's pointing out of the frequent differences between "standard textbook" Hebrew and colloquial Hebrew as spoken by the man in the street--if you already have some command of the language from formal study and want to make your Hebrew less "schoolboy" and more colloquial, this book will help a lot in that respect.

The example sentences in this book, as in Prof. Glinert's longer grammar of Modern Hebrew, deserve special mention, but as they are frequently mentioned in other reviews, I won't belabor the point.

This is an easily understandable, well written Hebrew grammar book. I use it as a supplement to a work book our teacher assigned in class. It reinforces the grammar very well.

Despite the other reviews presented here, *I* found the book a little pretentious. Many of the more complex grammatical concepts are just glossed over, or illustrated with non-standard examples. In addition, I found the fact that this author is British to be problemmatic. His background and academic experience tended to make the book come off as pedantic to American readers. References to parts of speech and grammatical elements are often inconsistent and unnecessarily complex. And finally, I found the fact that I had to write for the answers to the self-help exercises inexcusable. What good is a self-paced grammar text without the answers.

I found this book very useful, whether you are learning Hebrew from scratch or whether you are refreshing or formalizing your knowledge of the language. The book is structured in an increasing complexity order, which is good if you are reading the whole book sequentially, but makes it very inconvenient if you just want to look something up. What makes this even worse is the lack of an alphabetical index at the end of the book.