Hebrew is a fascinating language to get to know, despite the fact that learning to read it can be daunting at first. One of the biggest barriers to learning a new language is mastering its alphabet. While someone who speaks English can manage reading Spanish, French, German, Italian—languages that use Latin letters—Hebrew presents several key challenges. Let’s explore some of the features that make Hebrew such a unique language to read (and speak!).
The “Hebrew letters” we currently use are probably better described as “Aramaic letters”. The original Hebrew alphabet is not in use today, although it can be found in inscriptions and on key archaeological findings in museums around the world. The official name for this Ancient Hebrew alphabet is the Paleo-Hebrew Script, and it is only used today by the Samaritans. It closely resembles its ancestor, Proto-Canaanite, more than what the average Hebrew speaker would currently recognize as “Hebrew”. In contrast, the Aramaic letter system was first used to write Hebrew around the year 300 B.C.E., and it is the one still used for reading and writing Hebrew today. This alphabet is characterized by square letter shapes, unlike the rounder letters of Latin or the flowing, conjoined script of Arabic.
Properly speaking, the modern Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters, all representing consonants (there are no vowels in the Hebrew alphabet—more on this shortly). The names of these letters are ALEPH, BET (sometimes pronounced VET), GIMMEL, DALET, HEH, VAV, ZAYIN, KHET, TET, YOD, KAF (or KHAF), LAMMED, MEM, NUN, SAMMEKH, AYIN, PEH (or FEH), TZADI, QUF, RESH, SHIN, and TAV.
In addition to the 22 basic letter shapes, there are five letters that have final forms: KAF, MEM, NUN, PEH, and TZADI are written differently when they appear at the end of words. So altogether, you need to familiarize yourself with 27 letter shapes—just one more than the English alphabet, but hey—at least it’s not Russian (which has 33 letters)!
Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, is written and read from right to left. Why is that? In ancient times, before words were written with ink on paper, they were engraved into tough substances like metal or stone. Engraving requires more hand and arm strength than writing, so languages that originated with engraving favored a direction that provided better leverage for the dominant arm — typically the right arm for most people. This is why older languages are written and read from right to left. In contrast, newer languages such as Germanic and Latin, which were written with pigments on surfaces rather than being engraved, developed a left-to-right direction. This approach prevents the writing hand (often the right hand) from smudging the words as it moves across the writing surface. While adjusting to right-to-left writing may take some practice, one advantage is that Hebrew is more accommodating for left-handed individuals, as it reduces smudging during writing compared to many Western languages.
One of the biggest challenges for new readers of Hebrew is the absence of vowels in the alphabet, as mentioned earlier. What does this mean? Like several other languages originating in the Ancient Middle East, Hebrew is classified as an “abjad language”. This means that its 22 letters exclusively represent different consonant sounds. Hebrew uses five vowel sounds that closely resemble those in Spanish: AH as in “SaRAH”, EH like the E in “Everything”, EE as in “tEEth”, OH like the O in “Overground”, and OO as in “sUIt”. However, unlike languages using the Latin alphabet such as Spanish, Hebrew lacks dedicated letters to represent vowel sounds like A, E, I, O, and U.
Over the years, different systems of marking the vowel sounds have developed, with the most popular one known as “Niqqud Tveriani”. This is a series of dots and dashes that are written around the letters to represent the vowels. However, most native Hebrew speakers don’t use the Niqqud system in everyday reading and writing, except when first learning to read as kids in elementary school. Why? Because there’s actually no use for it once you are already familiar with a word. When you read words in any language, the letters serve as graphic representations of a concept (the “word”). Once you learn to recognize the word itself, you don’t need the vowels to guide pronunciation. This is true across languages—when reading in English, for instance, you don’t sound out each letter as you go (right?). If you did, you might mispronounce common words like “night”, “read”, or “drought”.
As you progress in Hebrew, you’ll quickly learn to recognize familiar words by their letters alone, without needing external vowels. Once you recognize the word, you’ll know how to pronounce it, eliminating the need for additional vowel markers. In fact, native Hebrew readers only use the vowel system when encountering a new word for the first time. We apply the same system in our book! So, rather than feeling intimidated by Hebrew’s lack of vowels, understand that it’s similar to how your mind processes written words in any language. Feel free to learn the Niqqud system initially, but you’ll soon feel comfortable discarding it once you’re familiar with a word’s correct pronunciation.
Along with the above rules about Niqqud (“outside vowel markings”, also known as “diacritics”), there are four letters that have evolved over the years to aid Hebrew readers in the pronunciation of written words. These are the letters ALEPH, HEH, VAV, and YOD. These letters, aside from acting as their original consonant sound markers, have an additional job in contemporary Hebrew—they can indicate the existence of a particular vowel sound. The letters ALEPH and HEH mostly correspond to the vowel sounds AH or EH, the letter VAV mostly corresponds to the vowel sounds OH and OO, and the letter YOD mostly corresponds to the vowel sound EE. This can be helpful when you’re transitioning to reading without the Niqqud system. In modern Hebrew words written without Niqqud, you’ll find many instances of ALEPH, HEH, VAV, and YOD letters “filling in” for the Niqqud system’s dots and dashes, guiding readers and reminding them of the vowel sounds where they appear.
Prepositions are words that define relationships between parts of a sentence. In English, these include words like “in”, “at”, “from”, “to”, and so on. Hebrew also uses prepositions, but many of them are not written as separate words. Instead, they are represented by single letters attached to the beginning of words. There are seven such letters that, when they appear at the start of a word, signify a preposition: the letter MEM, the letter SHIN, the letter HEH, the letter VAV, the letter KAF, the letter LAMMED, and the letter BET. These letters correspond to the English words “from”, “that”, “the”, “and”, “as”, “to”, and “in”, respectively. If you encounter any of these letters at the beginning of a word, it indicates that you may be reading two “words”—a noun or adjective preceded by a preposition.
The Hebrew language loves prefixes and suffixes! In addition to the seven preposition letters mentioned above, there are letters that come at the beginnings and ends of words that can tell us a lot about tenses, speakers, amounts, and much more. Some of the most common ones include using the letters ALEPH, YOD, TAV, and NUN at the beginning of a verb to signify that it’s in the future tense; the letters YOD, VAV, NUN, HEH and MEM at the end of a verb to signify that it’s a verb in the past tense; and the letters YOD, KAF, VAV and HEH and the letter couplings of NUN + VAV, KAF + MEM, KAF + NUN, HEH + MEM, and HEH + NUN to indicate an object’s possession. Once you get familiar with the various roles these letters can play when they appear at the beginnings and ends of words, it becomes a whole lot easier to work your way around any type of text in Hebrew- even Biblical Hebrew works this way!
Hebrew also loves a good abbreviation. In Hebrew, this tends to take the form of an initialism—you will often see a series of random-looking letters jumbled together, with the second-to-last letter separated from the last letter by what looks like a single double-quotation mark (“). This is actually a grouping of the initial letters from a series of words that often go together to make up a common phrase or a name. This is similar to examples in English like “F.B.I.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation) or NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization); however, it is much more commonly used in Hebrew, and not only with names—whole phrases and idioms are often condensed into well-known abbreviations, even for the most mundane subjects, like “afternoon” (often given as the letters ALEPH + KHET + HEH + ” + TZADI, for “ACHAR HA’TZAHARAYIM” [אחה״צ – ״אחר הצהריים״]), or “homework” (SHIN + ” + BET, for SHIUREY BAYIT [ש״ב – ״שיעורי בית״]). To spot an abbreviation, look out for the telltale single double-quotation mark, which, no matter how long the abbreviation is, will always come before the final letter in the series.
Hebrew is a completely gendered language, which means that all nouns are either masculine or feminine. Whether a noun is masculine or feminine depends on various factors. However, as a general rule, feminine singular nouns will end with either the letter HEH or the letter TAV, while all nouns ending in other letters are masculine.
Following this rule, masculine nouns form their plural by adding the letter couple YOD + MEM to the end of the noun, and feminine nouns form their plural by adding the letter couple VAV + TAV to the end of the noun.
Additionally, all cities and countries are feminine (except for the Vatican, which, for whatever reason, is rendered masculine. Go figure…).
The modern numeral system used by most of the world today was only popularized in the West in the 13th century C.E. What did people use to denote numbers before that? Different writing systems had different solutions, and Hebrew, for instance, used Hebrew letters to represent numbers. The first ten letters (ALEPH-YOD) represented the numerals 1-10, and then the letters KAF-TZADI represented the tens (20-90), with the final letters QUF-TAV representing 100, 200, 300, and 400.
Even though most modern Hebrew writing utilizes the Western numeral system, it is still quite common to find the Hebrew letter numeral system in use, especially in texts with official or religious significance. A common example is its use in marking days on calendars that follow the Hebrew months. When a Hebrew letter is used to represent a number, it will typically be accompanied by a single or double apostrophe.
The final point to keep in mind when learning to read Hebrew is the abundance of words in modern Hebrew that come from other languages. Words like “telephone”, “internet”, and “pajamas” have only entered the Hebrew language very recently and don’t have native Hebrew equivalents that are commonly used. Hebrew words are typically quite short. If you encounter a very long word in your Hebrew reading that puzzles you and you’re unsure of its meaning, check to see if what you’re reading might be a Hebrew approximation of a well-known English word (or possibly from French, German, Russian, or Arabic too!).
