For close to two thousand years Hebrew lived mostly on the page, in prayer, law, poetry and scholarship, while the people who read it spoke other languages at home. It came back into everyday speech around the turn of the twentieth century, and today it's the native language of millions of Israelis, the language of their road signs, group chats and arguments about football. That history explains a lot about what it's like to learn Hebrew now: an ancient alphabet, grammar that runs on old Semitic machinery, and a vocabulary rebuilt for buses, banks and smartphones. The way in is the same for everyone: the letters first, then the roots, then sentences of your own.
Where Hebrew is spoken, and which Hebrew to learn
Hebrew is the main language of Israel, with roughly nine million speakers, most of them living there. Many more people around the world read it in prayer, learn it for a bar or bat mitzvah or for religious study, or want to talk to family in Israel. Israel runs intensive Hebrew courses for new immigrants, called ulpan, and plenty of adults start there.
Hebrew is a Semitic language, a relative of Arabic, Aramaic and Maltese, the Semitic language written in Latin letters that our guide on how to learn Maltese covers. Modern Israeli Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew share an alphabet and much of their vocabulary but differ considerably in grammar and usage. If your goal is conversation, learn modern Hebrew; it will also give you a head start if you later want to read older texts.
How to learn Hebrew letters
The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, written right to left, with no capitals. Five letters take a different shape at the end of a word: כ becomes ך, מ becomes ם, נ becomes ן, פ becomes ף and צ becomes ץ. Three letters have two sounds each: ב is b or v, כ is k or kh, and פ is p or f.
The bigger surprise is that all 22 letters are consonants. Vowels exist as a system of dots and dashes called niqqud, but they appear mainly in children's books, poetry, prayer books and learner material. Everyday Hebrew leaves them out, with ו and י doing some of the work: ו can be v, o or u, and י can be y or i. So שלום, shalom, is written sh-l-o-m, and the a is left for you to supply. The same three letters, ספר, can be sefer (book), safar (he counted) or sapar (barber), and context decides.
Learn the printed letters first, with niqqud, then start reading words you know without it. Handwritten Hebrew uses a cursive alphabet that looks quite different from print, so if you'll write by hand, learn it in the second or third week.
Modern pronunciation has merged some letters, which makes spelling harder than speaking: ט and ת are both t, כ and ק both k, ח and the soft כ both kh, ס and שׂ both s, and א and ע are often silent.
Roots: how Hebrew builds words
Most Hebrew words grow from a root of three consonants that carries a core meaning. Learn the root and you can recognise its relatives. The root כ-ת-ב (k-t-v) has to do with writing:
| Hebrew | Say it | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| כתב | katav | he wrote |
| כותב | kotev | writes, is writing (said of a man) |
| מכתב | mikhtav | a letter |
| כתובת | ktovet | an address |
| כתיב | ktiv | spelling |
Verbs follow seven patterns, called binyanim, which add meanings such as passive, causative or reflexive to a root. You won't need all of them in the first month, but knowing they exist turns a long vocabulary list into a set of families.
What is easy and what is hard
Several things are easier than people fear. Present-tense verbs have only four forms, for a man, a woman, men and women: כותב (kotev), כותבת (kotevet), כותבים (kotvim), כותבות (kotvot). There's no verb "to be" in the present: אני סטודנט (ani student) is "I am a student". Nouns don't take cases, the word order is subject, verb, object, and modern Hebrew is full of international words such as טלפון (telefon) and אוניברסיטה (universita).
The hard parts are reading without vowels, the roots and patterns, and gender, which reaches further than in most European languages. A man says אני לומד (ani lomed), "I'm learning", and a woman says אני לומדת (ani lomedet). "You" is אתה (ata) to a man and את (at) to a woman, and numbers have masculine and feminine forms too. To keep things lively, את is also the spelling of et, the little word that marks a definite direct object.
First words in Hebrew
- שלום (shalom): hello, goodbye and peace
- מה נשמע? (ma nishma?): how's it going?, literally "what is heard?"
- מה שלומך? (ma shlomkha? to a man, ma shlomekh? to a woman): how are you?
- תודה (toda) and תודה רבה (toda raba): thanks, and thanks a lot
- בבקשה (bevakasha): please, here you are, and you're welcome
- כן (ken) and לא (lo): yes and no
- סליחה (slikha): excuse me, sorry
- בוקר טוב (boker tov): good morning
- מים (mayim): water
- אני לא מבין (ani lo mevin) or אני לא מבינה (ani lo mevina): I don't understand, said by a man or by a woman
A first month to learn Hebrew
- Week 1: the letters. All 22 printed letters, the five final forms and the main vowel marks. Read short words with niqqud aloud every day.
- Week 2: greetings and the present tense. The words above, the numbers to ten, and five common verbs in all four present-tense forms.
- Week 3: roots and reading without vowels. Collect words from three or four roots, and start reading words you already know without vowel marks. Learn the cursive letters if you need them.
- Week 4: your own sentences. Write a few lines a day about yourself, with the right gender for you, and send them to a Hebrew speaker or another learner for corrections.
By the end of the month you'll be partway through A1 on the CEFR scale and able to read short, familiar words without help.
How Qlango helps you learn Hebrew
Qlango teaches Hebrew from A1 to B2, so the course takes you from your first שלום to the level where you can talk with Hebrew speakers fluently enough that neither side has to strain, and follow the main ideas of complex texts. While the letters are new you can show a Latin transliteration under each word and hide it once you read on your own. Building sentences and writing answers yourself is how gender agreement sticks, and spaced repetition keeps the roots you've met in circulation. The chat lets you write to other learners, with message translation and AI help to write a reply. Premium, described on the pricing page, adds offline learning and an AI teacher for questions about binyanim, roots or any sentence that puzzles you. You choose the language you learn through, and every course and level is on the languages page.
Three letters, ספר, and three possible words: that's the puzzle at the heart of reading Hebrew, and every root you learn makes it smaller. Week one asks only for the letters, so begin there, in Qlango's A1 course with the transliteration switched on.
