Teach Yourself Complete Modern Hebrew?

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CurlySue
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Teach Yourself Complete Modern Hebrew?

Postby CurlySue » Sun Mar 26, 2017 7:06 pm

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone had used the "Teach Yourself Complete Modern Hebrew" course (the book along with the CDs). If you have, what were your thoughts on it?

I was looking at the reviews on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Modern- ... 071750541/

A couple of people said that the print size was very small (making it hard to see the niqqud/vowels). One reviewer also said that the book moves a bit quickly and doesn't get into grammar much.

Here's the thing: I'm not a fan of explicit grammar instruction (except for the absolute basics at the beginning of one's studies, and even then...). In Japanese, I only explicitly studied grammar at the beginning; after that, I've had a great deal of success just immersing myself in Japanese media and SRSing/Anki'ing things that are new to me. I see no reason why a similar approach couldn't work for Hebrew, so I'm not worried about a lack of explicit grammar instruction.

Also, I've decided to go about learning Hebrew by pretty much ignoring niqqud. I know what they are and can read/recognize them, but I've decided not to rely on them. I'm basically focusing on the spoken language a lot and am only learning how to write words if I know how to pronounce them.

Basically, I'm thinking of getting this Teach Yourself course, listening-reading to the dialogues, and then SRSing sentences/phrases from the dialogues (with no niqqud).

If anyone has any experience with this program, do you think it would be a good resource for how I'm going about things?

And is it true that there are some mistakes/typos in it? That's actually one of my biggest concerns.
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zenmonkey
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Re: Teach Yourself Complete Modern Hebrew?

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Mar 27, 2017 4:54 pm

No idea about this program in particular - personally, my experience with Teach Yourself wasn't one where I found the material really engaging. But no worse than Living Language - which I have for Hebrew.

Just so you know, at about the same price you have ASSIMIL and Hebrew from Scratch.

Good luck.
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CurlySue
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Re: Teach Yourself Complete Modern Hebrew?

Postby CurlySue » Tue Mar 28, 2017 1:30 am

So it turns out that my local library has a Teach Yourself Modern Hebrew course, albeit a slightly different version: https://www.amazon.com/Yourself-Modern- ... 071445242/

The dialogues are centered around tourist-y things; also, some content is presented is as-is without a lot of grammatical explanations. Both of these things can be pluses or minuses depending on what a person is interested in and how they learn.

The text is a bit small (as some of the Amazon reviewers complain about) but I can read everything even with my glasses off, so it's not a huge deal.

The course doesn't introduce as much vocabulary as the Living Language Hebrew course (which my library also has), but the latter has very short dialogues that don't use most of the vocabulary they teach you. In the Teach Yourself course, there is less vocab but it is all used in the dialogues.
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Re: Teach Yourself Complete Modern Hebrew?

Postby stormj » Sat May 06, 2017 6:44 am

It's OK but it's not going to get you to the point where anyone in Israel won't switch to English almost automatically on you.

Modern Hebrew grammar isn't that complicated and ignoring the vowels is a good policy, but knowing what they are is a good thing since sometimes they will be shown for reference.

Hebrew From Scratch is probably your best bet for a book. Assimil is decent too.
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