38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not so bad at all...., November 3, 2005
This review is from: Teach Yourself Modern Hebrew Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses) (Audio CD)
I totally disagree with the first reviewer; but rather than write a completely new review, I'm going to simply address that review point by point:
First, about accents not being indicated, I think any serious language learner should ALWAYS buy the recordings if he wants to have any chance of understanding what he hears, and being understood when he speaks.
The Hebrew print is about the same size as the English, but is in a finer font than is sometimes seen, without shading and serifs -- or maybe it's just time to get some reading glasses. Americans often complain about "typos" in British books (like this one is). British books follow Oxford spellings, not Webster's. In the Hebrew, the text is in "ktiv maleh", using yods and vavs in the regular spelling to suggest vowels, unlike in "ktiv khaser" where the vowel points are used instead.
Yes, it introduces frequently used idioms early on, to give the learner a useful type of language to start with, even if the specific grammar point hasn't been dealt with yet. Languages don't come in neat packages.
About the "complicated verb system", this course teaches a good variety of useful verbs, in the present, past, future and imperative tenses. That's a lot more USEFUL, to a speaker who hopes to communicate meaningfully in the language, than being able to take a root and ring all the changes on it, through "pa'al, pu'al, nif'al, hitpa'el" and so on.
And about the lack of translation, Teach Yourself books wisely avoid translation exercises as much as possible. Many people make the mistake of thinking there should always be translation; but translation is a separate skill which is often not even helpful in language learning, since it presumes that everything has to go through English, which can cause serious problems for someone trying to keep up with a rapid speaker.
In fact, my only complaint with this course is that it turned out to be much more basic than I needed. I put in the last CD and listened to the final track, and found I could understand every single word of it. Apparently I remember more of the language from the "ulpan" than I thought I did.
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33 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
TERRIBLE BOOK, January 31, 2005
as a long time reader of Teach Yourself series in several langs. I am amazed at how low they have sunk in quality. this latest one in Hebrew is awful. there is no indication of accent marks(you have to buy tapes), the book tries to be a travel book + language, but succeeds at neither, no explaination of complicated hebrew verb system at all, book is geared more to pithy travel phrases(most of which are idiomatic and impossible to figure out in advance); numerous misspellings in both the English & Hebrew, the hebrew printing is extremely small and almost impossible to read without a magnifying glass! - and almost no meaningful translations are given as exercises to practice what little you may learn from this book. Overall- there is no redeeming qualities to recommend. Save your money!
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
One of the worst language courses available, March 22, 2007
This review is from: Teach Yourself Modern Hebrew Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses) (Audio CD)
I can only agree with most other reviewers here, the book is awful. In recent years, the Teach Yourself series has expanded and published courses in many new languages. That's great... were it not for the fact that this expansion has resulted in a drastic decline in quality, at least for some books. Three of the very worst are the courses for Persian, Slovenian and - you guessed it - Hebrew.
I don't know how the publisher's got the nerve to call this a "Complete Course"?!? From a complete course, I expect
- A vocabulary of at least 1300 words. Above 1500 is great, but 1300 is OK. This book is nowhere near even 1000 words.
- An explanation of the grammar. Not so in this book, very limited grammar explanations.
- Useful guides for pronunciation. I disagree with the reviewer who thinks that everybody has to buy the CDs. Of course everybody would prefer to, but it's a question of money. Most authors of language courses are fully capable of writing pronunciation guidelines, although not this author.
All in all, there is no reason why you should even consider buying this book. Especially not when you have the option of buying Colloquial Hebrew, a book that excells over this one in every possible way.
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