Our teacher recommended this song to us today – בגללך.
During this ulpan I’ve been trying to find songs that highlight the grammatical parts we are learning.
One of the songs I found (to highlight the feminine form of ‘you will be’:
Starting intensive ulpan study
July 21, 2015
Hebrew has taken a bit of a back burner while working on a couple other languages.
However I’ve still managed to keep a lot of Hebrew song listening — which has helped me remember the words I learned and keep on getting better acquainted with the sounds.
Then this spring I discovered Hello Talk.I downloaded the app and got a lot of practice talking. Hello Talk allows you to make profile with your native language and the language you are learning and connect to other people who are interested in exchanging language practice.
One of the reasons Hello Talk was such a find for me was because I wanted to prepare for this summer’s ulpan in Israel.
I enjoy studying Hebrew by myself but I wanted to try something different and take an official ulpan and see how it helped my language study. Also I wanted to score well in the oral test so that I could progress as much as possible this summer.
The oral test was pretty anti-climatic. (It mainly just was asking what I had studied and whether I had studied with any books. But I was able to conduct almost completely in Hebrew, so I was pleased.)
I got placed in Bet. It’s been good so far. I know almost all the grammar (except for some of the particular rules about the future tense) but am learning a lot of new vocabulary and getting lots of listening and speaking practice.
And it’s fun being reborn into a new language with a group of comrades. No longer am I the only one struggling with new words, wondering how to express something, falling flat on my face trying to create a new sentence, or or puzzled about the meaning of a confusing clause in the text. Instead we are in it together. . . helping each other, encouraging each other, sometimes laughing at each other and helping each other get up and keep going.
The teacher does almost all her teacher-talk in Hebrew and grades her language very well according to what we have studied so far, making her speech more and more complicated as she introduces the grammatical points or vocabulary.
It’s been so fun and such a good immersive experience, I want to come back after this month and take more intensive ulpans as soon as I can.
Kickstarting our Anki deck
August 14, 2013
The last few days I’ve been thinking of hosting the Tatoeba Hebrew Anki deck on KickStarter. That way we can pay for both the recording and some of the segmenting as well.
More audio for Tatoeba Anki
August 6, 2013
Now 524 of the sentences in the Tatoeba Hebrew Anki deck have audio files. At present there are 3,2477 sentences in all, so there are still 31,953 sentences left to go. Onward ho!
Update: Audio is at 704. August 6 2013, 11:35PM
Update2: Audio is at 941. August 7 2013, 11:27PM
Segmenting Hebrew audio files like there’s no tomorrow
August 5, 2013
The last few days I’ve been spending almost all my free time on segmenting audio files for the Tatoeba deck — and I now got almost all of the first thousand sentences segmented (I have 120 sentences more to go.) I’ll have to quickly input them into anki because. . .
I already have the next 1400 sentences recorded and I need to segment them as well and put them into Anki as soon as possible.
So far the Tatoeba deck is 32,473 sentences but I’ve been hanging around a bit in the Tatoeba website (it get’s rather addictive) and it seems like there are loads of new Hebrew sentences being added every day, so I’m sure I’ll eventually want to update the deck again.
I’ve leached the sentences that don’t have mp3 files yet and am studying with the sentence files I already have added.
Biblical hebrew
August 5, 2013
I haven’t really started Biblical Hebrew in earnest (although earlier this year I did a lot of listening of the Psalms). However, later on when I do work on it, I’ll probably follow this guy’s method — making anki decks of sentences from the Tanach (with audio).
Studying grammar first seems like one of the worst ways to study classical Hebrew. And since text and audio are easy to get, it’s mainly a matter of segmenting sections and then reviewing them on anki.
The one sad thing is that I haven’t been able to find audio for the whole Tanach cantilated yet. I really enjoy the cantilated version and I think it should help for memorization as well.
Hebrew anki deck
August 3, 2013
The last couple weeks I’ve spent a lot of time on listening to Hebrew — either radio, podcast, or youtube movies.
Today I updated my Tatoeba sentence deck. Originally it was 7,000 Hebrew sentences but I added an odd 25,000 more Hebrew sentences with the English translations. I also added audio files to t237 of the sentences.
I’ve already recorded around 1,100 sentences. My goal for the next few days is to segment the remaining sentences and add them to the deck, as well as record another thousand sentences.
Segmenting the sentences and inputting them into Anki is rather time consuming, but since I’m listening to the audio and looking at the translation while I’m doing it, I feel it’s partly study as well.
The more I work on the Tatoeba deck, the more I like it. It starts out with really simple sentences and then goes to more complex sentences. It also often includes several different ways to say the same thing, which I find it fun to learn at the same time.
Yanshuf ~ Digital Hebrew newspaper with audio
December 20, 2012
Diary easy hebrew newspaper, hebrew, newspaper 2 Comments
When I was in Israel I would often buy the Sha’ar La’Mathil. I never got the digital version. (I hadn’t even realised one existed). Then several months ago the newspaper ceased publication.
Browsing the internet for useful materials I came accidentally upon two other easy Hebrew newspaper — the Bereshit and Yanshuf. The Bereshit is a beginner’s newspaper and the Yanshuf is for those who are intermediate or advanced. They have a test you can take to determine your level. I was originally planning on getting the Bereshit but I scored a 90/100 on the test so they recommended I get the Yanshuf instead. I ordered my 2 year electronic subscription earlier this week and just got an email today that the first two issues were available.
In Israel when I read the Sha’ar La’Mathil with friends we had to get someone to read the text for us. We then recorded it so we could use it for listening and pronunciation practice. Words we couldn’t figure out we also had to ask a Hebrew speaker. However the Bereshit and Yanshuf come with a dictionary sheet and (best of all) audio.
I’ve added the audio into itunes. I’ll sync it with my ipod touch and listen to it to familiarize myself with the articles before I dive in and read the articles.
Acquiring Hebrew 