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You are here: Home / Free Children's Learning / Hebrew 2: Vowels (Part I)

July 17, 2019 By kehillah

Hebrew 2: Vowels (Part I)

Hebrew vowels are a little annoying for some people. They are not their own letters, but instead are dots you’ll see around letters. This can also be confusing if you are used to reading the English spelling of Hebrew words, such as beit (house) or baruch (blessing).

For example, we would spell the Hebrew word for house B-E-I-T. B and T are the consonants and E and I are the vowels. But they all sit next to each other, so you just read each letter and you can pronounce a word.

In Hebrew, it works differently. Shucks!

The word beit/house looks like this:

בֵּית

When you read Hebrew, you have to learn how to see both “B” sound and the “EI” sound at the same time so that you can say “BEI” then finish with a T to say B-E-I-T.

Eventually, you’ll learn to see the whole word at once, without even having vowels, and know what a word is. It looks like this:

בֵּית

בית

The other thing is that Israelis have a particular accent because they learn Modern Hebrew. We are learning Biblical Hebrew, which is different.

For example, we are going to learn to say house/beit as “BEIT”. Modern Hebrew would say “BUY-EET”. Jews from Eastern Europe might even pronounce it “BUY-IS” or “BUY-EES”. So let’s keep it simple and only learn one thing.

No homework. Move onto the next Hebrew unit.

Filed Under: Free Children's Learning, Hebrew

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