Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Modern Hebrew Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses)

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

 

 

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.

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!

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.

Besides heartily seconding everything Makarov9 has said, I might also suggest "Colloquial Hebrew" as an alternative written resource (I haven't heard the accompanying audio) as it has basically everything that the Teach Yourself book is lacking, & also the Pimsleur audio-only course, which unlike other CD programs has a good balance of repetition & new material, and having finished it I found myself with quite a decent repertoire of Hebrew which has, over the past year or so, remarkably stayed with me.

Don't waste your time with this one. It's a horrendous step down from the usual quality of the Teach Yourself series. I'm at a loss to see how anyone other than a shill can find anything in this book to compliment. If you come to this book with zero knowledge I doubt you'll leave with much more than that.

'Teach Yourself Modern Hebrew' is one of the worst texts I have seen for learning Hebrew. The book struck me more as a travel guide than a Hebrew language text, a terrible one at that. The author describes locations and points of interest in Israel in much more detail than any grammatical point. I don't understand how this book was permitted to be published as a Hebrew primer. What is happening to the 'Teach Yourself' series? How could such an excellent series like this be allowed to lose prestige because of a horrific text like this? I wouldn't waste my time with this book, either as a Hebrew language primer or as a travel guide. If one wants an excellent text for Hebrew, I recommend Esther Raizen's 'Modern Hebrew for Beginners'.

The cds are excellent, the material in the book is good, however, the Hebrew letters are too small to even try to read or write. Plus the font used for the Hebrew causes one to wonder if it is even Hebrew. Unless you like using magnifying glasses and know enough Hebrew to figure out what the letters are, you may want to purchase an other product.

I've had disappointment before with Teach Yourself language books lacking basic things, but a friend recommended the Arabic version to me and seeing that, it seemed the courses had been seriously revamped.

Revamped they may have been - but sadly "modern hebrew" lives up to TY's general lack of in depth study, too many misprints, non-translation of words used predominantly in texts, and generally just not clear enough for the hobbyist or in depth enough for the serious language learner.

1) Misprints.

When a language is in as exotic and unusual-looking a script as Hebrew, and when it is printed right to left and not left to right, any misprints in the transliteration can be at the least very confusing for the new learner. In one of the first verb conjugations in the book, the transliteration of two of the basic personal pronouns is mistyped - one is backwards, one is a mix - leaving a learner potentially trying to work out quite how one pronounces "emh". There are several other misprints.

One of the more serious is in the key to the exercises, where the wrong verb (though in the right person) is used for 2 out of 5 answers. I'm an experienced enough linguist to be able to spot that it wasn't my mistake, but for someone coming to the book with no language experience and trusting the "teach yourself" ethic, this could be immensely frustrating and possibly discouraging.

2) Misprints or non-explained grammar/morphology.

There are quite a few places where words appear in Hebrew spelt in two different ways - sometimes on the same page. 's are also used in the middle of some words in one place, and not in others - with no explanation. Particularly as the ' is easily confused with the Hebrew letter Yod, this is very confusing, and given the myriad misprints elsewhere, it is not easy to be confident whether this is some kind of grammatical thing or merely another instance of carelessness on the editors' part. The blithe assurance in the woefully inadequate grammar summary/revision in the back of the book that sometimes letters are missed out or doubled but that this is a question "not to be asked now" is not helpful or reassuring, and I am not left feeling confident that I know when the random 's are mistakes and when they are grammar issues.

3) Lack of grammar/badly explained grammar/lack of grammar tables.

I appreciate that grammar isn't everyone's cup of tea, but - it IS essential in language study at some stage or another, and even if it does not form the bulk of the main texts, it needs to be addressed somewhere.

TY Modern Hebrew has a grand total of 4 pages dealing with "language revision". It doesn't have grammatical tables of conjugation of nouns or declension of verb endings even for basic regular patterns except tucked into the main text and badly explained.

Prefixes are badly explained and often made more complex in an effort to make them appear "not boring grammar".

A short "language traps to avoid" section is useful but a little of a non-entity.

I realise that pages of grammar can be a turn off for any student, and the reams of verb tables etc in the back of, for example, TY Arabic, are indeed intimidating. But these things need to be available to the student to reference as and when they need to, and as their confidence in handling the language grows and they start to use language not contained in the book.

Even within the context of the book, several times in even the first few chapters, constructions are used or words are referenced which are not explained or translated anywhere in the book. Granted a reasonable linguist will pick up meanings and figure out constructions, but this is not a book necessarily aimed at reasonable linguists but potentially at monoglot beginners.

4) Non-translation of words used in the text/translations not linked to text.

In several places, the book asks questions about texts or uses words without translation of those words in time for the student to have come across them elsewhere. Some words can be picked up easily from context, or because they are borrowed words from other languages. And I am 100% in favour of having a go at figuring out words, and not having everything handed on a plate. BUT the beginning student needs the help for most things, and especially non-obvious words, on the page or before the text. Several pages later or in a later chapter - and often on a page with a text that doesn't use that word - is very unhelpful.

5) Bad explanation of script/prononciation/writing.

Given the transliterations used in the first chapters of the book, it is very apparent that the advice and help given on reading and writing the script is not as comprehensive as one would hope when two whole chapters are devoted to it. The handwritten letters are not written on lines so it's not easy to see how they lie in relation to the printed line, and none of them give any help as to how they are formed/stroke order.

Additionally, several of the letters are marked as having no exact parallel in English and one has, therefore, to "listen carefully to the recording". All very well, but the recording is of the names of the letters, not of their sounds, and letters like Ayin remain a mistery. Given the complexity of some of the sounds in related Semitic languages, this is not comforting...

The explanation of the pointing for vowels is also faulty, many of them are described badly or with words that differ greatly in prononciation and are therefore very unhelpful. Comparing them with the recording, only a few of them really fit well with the sounds of the words used to describe them, and I have a reasonably RP English accent.

One of them, "Shva", is linked to the second syllable of "tractor". Yes, most of us say "trak-ter" in normal speech, the second syllable ending up as a schwa, but seeing "O as in tractor" will convince many the vowel should be said "or" or "aw", given that most people don't really think about how speech is elided in normal use when they are trying to pronounce new letters in a new language.

In conclusion...

Weirdly enough, despite all the faults, I have actually enjoyed studying the language with this book. How much of that is due to enjoyment of Hebrew and how much is down to the book is debatable, but for benefit of the doubt I have to give 2 stars. However... it is frustrating, not well written, riddled with mistakes, and missing a lot of necessary explanation for a book which boldly claims its goal as "all round confidence" and having content that "explores the language in depth". The book would suffice to whet the appetite and "get by" reasonably well on holiday in Israel, but in no way would it give all round confidence, and if there's one thing for sure, depth is lacking. A great shame and a disservice to a language which (despite the book) I am growing to love.

If you can supplement it with a more accurate, in depth, and informative book, then some of the exercises are reasonably fun and useful. But in its current state crammed full of mistakes and thin on grammar help, it isn't worth the usual sale price even with the CDs. Deeply disappointing.

*i have had it for three months now and i have completely demolished this book because i have read it over and over again. i learned how to read the hebrew script because of this book. many post negative comments because they believe that after this one book they should be speaking perfect hebrew (idiots!) but if you want to get the basics of the language (which is the first step) this book is a must. the one negative and it's somewhat a positive-negative is that after chapter 7 it drops english letters completely and substitutes them for the hebrew script, so you may be a bit lost, but this is also a positive-negative because it forces you to learn the hebrew alphabet without any excuses or reliance on english-which i may add is your end goal AND where you want to be in the end AND the whole reason you bought this book in the first place....riiight?

I have to agree with the majority of reviewers here. The book leaves a lot to be desired. I don't have a problem with the concept and structure of the book, but I do have a problem with the ridiculously small print; especially with the vowel signs. I had to use a magnifying glass to tell them apart...And I wear reading glasses!

I'm still going to work with the book, although I know the going will be at a snail's pace using a friggin' magnifying glass. Hopefully another edition will address the small print problem. Until then, I'm not holding my breath.

The companion CDs are real plus. Glad I got the combo version instead of the book by itself.

If anybody is interested, I recommend a book titled Teach Yourself To Read Hebrew (CD & Book Set) sold here on Amazon. Don't be put off by the Teach Yourself part of the title, it isn't by the same publisher as the problematic, Teach Yourself Modern Hebrew book. You'll be surprised at your fast progress. I just might work with it exclusively, finish it, and then go back to the TYMH book. Check it out!
Teach Yourself to Read Hebrew (CD & Book Set)