Hebrew for Dummies,   ISBN:9780764554896

Customer Rating: 

Good help for quick learning of Hebrew esential sentences, but just to talk and not get lost.

Customer Rating: 

I picked this book up at the Library after having studied Hebrew via Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone and several other printed books. I immediately began to notice inconsistencies in transcription and spelling that confused me, and before I had completed the first chapter I put it down.

I have no doubt the author means well - and the cultural information is interesting - but Hebrew is a highly complex language and consistency is critical for a beginning learner, at whom this book is aimed.

Customer Rating: 

The book is 100% in English, hence there are no hebrew characters. You don't learn the letters because you can't. Some sounds don't translate well and the English characters make it hard to remember what sounds the word is. There are a lot more resources out there that teach you the letters and still really a lot on English

Customer Rating: 

If you do not have any knowledge of the language, this might give you a leg up in VERY basic volcabulary. If you have ever taken any Hebrew course, or lived there, visited there, or even just heard the language being spoken around you, DO NOT buy this book. It is absolutely horrible; there is no spelling in Hebrew, only minimal explanation of the Hebrew alphabet, horrific breaches in the normal English spelling of many Hebrew words, and no real explanation of anything. Go for Pimsleur, Barron's Mastering Hebrew, or a course at your local community collage; this book is the worst $20 you'll ever spend. Avoid at all costs.

**EDIT** for some reason, it show 2 stars: while I would prefer negative stars, that is not an option. I do not, I stress, DO NOT willingly give this book any stars. Worst Book Ever Written.

Customer Rating: 

I am perhaps unusual in that I'm interested in learning Hebrew although I'm not studying the Bible, nor am I planning to travel to Israel, nor am I Jewish, nor am I marrying into a Jewish family. I am interested in learning Hebrew for the sake of learning a rich and difficult language which will open up a huge amount of literature to me. In this respect, "Hebrew for Dummies" sucks. It assumes that the reader is a.) American, b.) Jewish (or at least closely related to someone Jewish) and c.) learning-impaired. I suppose the last one is kind of the point of the "For Dummies" series, which as a series I've never found very helpful.

Nevertheless, after struggling with this book's relentlessly silly approach I ended up selling it to a secondhand bookshop and acquiring a couple of books on Biblical Hebrew (by J. Weingreen and John Dobson), both of which were far more packed with information than this gee-whiz compendium of empty chit-chat. I noticed, too, that the conversations on the accompanying CD of my edition did not always correspond to the transcripts in the book; I am enough of a linguist to be able to tell when what I'm hearing is not what I'm reading. Perhaps this has been fixed in subsequent editions.

The final problem is that Jacobs does not solve the huge problem of teaching the student to read the Hebrew alphabet. The student of Hebrew who is not put to work straight away at deciphering the alphabet is, to put it bluntly, screwed. This book may teach you how to order a coffee in Jerusalem, but you will probably not learn how to read the menu in the coffee shop. I don't think that that's worth the money.

I am still keen to learn Modern Hebrew, but the only people I can recommend this book to are those who have never been exposed to any language other than American English. Even then, I think they would be better off taking lessons.