Hebrew

The more often students are exposed to Hebrew and practice using it, the stronger their language skills will be. Here's a simple, quick activity you can use today!

Decoding is the first step in learning to read. Then what?

Beneath the surface prayer program is a rigorous pedagogic structure that has been carefully crafted to home in on specific concepts, skills, and content.

Learning a second language is simply not the same as learning a first language, according to Dina Maiben, director of the Hebrew program at Gratz College.

That’s true for reading as well as learning to speak. Understanding how sounds are combined into words and words into sentences is something that develops over time in early childhood, but once a learner has reached school age, it is likely fully developed. And once mastered, it can easily be applied to a new language. By the time students are in 3^rd grade, they are more than ready developmentally to apply what they understand about phonics to a second language. "For second-language learning, it doesn’t take many years for children to build the oral/aural foundations of a language that are necessary for understanding how print maps onto the sounds of the language, as it would for first language learning," Maiben says.

Hear more from Maiben in our video series abo

Energize your classes this week with a quick, useful activity to learn to say a simple Hebrew greeting

Jeremy Benstein, author of the new book Hebrew Routes, Jewish Routes: A Tribal Language in a Global World discusses the future of Hebrew as the featured guest on The Promised Podcast.

Plain and simple: Students benefit when they learn to decode in tandem with hearing the language. 

Oral language and decoding go hand-in-hand, reinforcing each other, according to Dina Maiben, director of the Hebrew program at Gratz College. Such an approach increases proficiency, decreases frustration, and helps students build on what they know and progress at a smooth pace. 

Hear more from Maiben herself, as part of our video series about effective Hebrew learning strategies.

How can you incorporate oral Hebrew into your program?  

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Written by Dr. Jeremy Benstein, "Hebrew Wordshops - A New Way to Connect to Hebrew" explores the potency of the three-letter roots that enrich our connection to Hebrew and Jewish values. 

If the alef bet is any indication, Greek and Hebrew share a lot. The first letters of the Greek alphabet are α, β, γ, δ—alpha, beta, gamma, delta. And Hebrew? א ,בּ ,ג ,ד—alef, bet, gimmel, dalet.

The same ancient Semitic system, Phoenician in origin, of which Hebrew is one example, gave rise not only to Greek but also Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets.  

Yet Greek and Hebrew are very different languages, and are even written in opposite directions. As Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote, one goes west to east, while the other goes east to west.

In Hebrew, the names of most of the letters actually mean something. They are words, not just sounds. The consonants comprising the name