Customer Reviews

Modern Hebrew I, 2nd Edition (Pimsleur Language Program)

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Don't let the price of this scare you. If you really want to learn to speak and understand Hebrew, get these tapes. You will be learning in much the same way that you learned to speak your native language -- through hearing and response.

Once you have finished this, you will be able to speak in present and a little past tense about several subjects, including food, getting directions, buying things, telling time, and talking about your family. After that, take a class or learn more formally, but this will really give you a leg up into actually using the language.

The right way to think about Pimsleur is as a glorified phrasebook. It teaches you some useful phrases, and it has a few added advantages: (1) it teaches you to vary the elements a little (2) it helps you with pronunciation (3) you can listen to it in the car, when textbooks and flashcards aren't handy. It also comes with some disadvantages: (1) it's much, much more expensive and (2) it doesn't teach you to read or write. In Hebrew, the latter is non-trivial.

As a result, it's most useful for learning the numbers, since this involves practicing combining a few elements in a variety of forms as quickly as you can. (This is a little harder in Hebrew than in most languages, since you have to learn the masculine and feminine forms of each number.)

Buyers should also be aware of certain editorial choices the creators made. Some grammatical and phonological forms in Hebrew are omitted by many speakers, even though they're required in formal registers and widely perceived as being more "correct." Examples: (1) "And in shekels?" is given as "vebeshkalim?" not "uvishkalim?" (2) "She lives" is given as "hi GARah," (stress on the first syllable) whereas in formal Hebrew "hi GARah" means "she lived" and "hi garAH" means "she lives." (3) "Harbeh" is used in some places where formal Hebrew requires "rav" (4) The two Hebrew words for "why": "lammah" and "madua," are not distinguished; lammah is used everywhere. Some of these choices are justified for pedagogical purposes--many Israelis omit these features, after all--but others involve teaching forms that are actively stigmatized. For instance, Pimsleur consistently uses "eizeh" for "which", but many Israelis view this as an error, and use different forms for masculine (eizeh), feminine (eizo), and plural (eilu) nouns.

I think a lot of the appeal for something like Pimsleur comes from the idea that it tries to teach languages without formal grammar (ugh, who likes that), the way children learn it. The thing is, research seems to indicate that children don't really learn languages more easily than adults; we just don't remember the years of slogging it took to learn our native language. In fact, a lot of features and regularities are actually quicker to learn with a textbook and some admittedly unpleasant memorization. For instance, with a textbook you'll instantly see that the verbs "hayah" (be), "raah" (see), "kanah" (buy), unlike other verbs, take an "i" sound in the past tense because the third letter of their root is "heh", instead of having to learn the paradigm anew for each verb with Pimsleur.

The bottom line: If you want to learn Hebrew well, be prepared to work really, really hard. Pimsleur can still be a component--but only a component--of your study plan. But keep in mind that you'll do almost as well with a textbook and some elbow grease, and it'll cost you a lot less.