Thursday, June 13, 2019

Learn to Recognize Hebrew Letters And Shalom - how and who and why?

What use is Hebrew to a traveller, outside Israel?
Israeli flag

Hebrew appears on buildings in many European buildings, synagogues, gravestones in Jewish cemeteries, labels on kosher food in supermarkets, Jewish or Israeli restaurants in American, London, South Africa. Former Jewish quarters. Jewish museums worldwide. Repurposed buildings. Amost every country of the world.


The lower clock on the Jewish Town Hall building in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, with Hebrew numerals in counterclockwise order
If you can recognise the words Shalom, Kosher, and Israel you are starting to learn the Hebrew alphabet.

A question on the facebook polyglot page was about the word shalom. I replied:

Angela Lansbury Shalom means peace and is a greeting, same as the Arabic salaam, no vowels here. The vowels are written above in Hebrew, looking like diacritics for tones in French and other languages. Reading from the right, as in Arabic, sh, l, silent letter to which you can attach a vowel dot, m.

The Hebrew alphabet was used to create the Greek alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet used by the Russians and with slight variation by the Bulgarians. (The Bulgarians would have it the other way around.)

Who likes to learn Hebrew - and Greek?
Scholars and students of the bible. Priests who want to learn Hebrew and Greek to understand the bible, for Christans the New Testament as well as the Old Testament.

The Hebrew alphabet is also used to write Yiddish, which contains a lot of German words.
The first letter of shalom is Sh. It looks like a W. 


SymbolNameTransliterationIPAExample
שׁ (right dot)shinsh/ʃ/shop
שׂ (left dot)sins/s/sour

You can learn to recognize Hebrew letters on

Useful Websites
Free website learning course
duolingo.com

Conversation and lessons with speakers of the language
Fee 
italki.com

https://www.facebook.com/groups/polygotcommunity/?multi_permalinks=2317929445092481&notif_id=1560233138126677&notif_t=group_highlights

italki.com


Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, atuhor and speaker. teacher of English and other languages. if you want a lesson to get started in any language just contact me in person in Singapore or the UK, or online.

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