Hebrew by osmosis

[cellio]

I've had poor results trying to learn Hebrew formally, and some ok results just picking things up by osmosis, so it's time to ask for some pointers from my Hebrew-literate friends. (Ok, my timing probably stinks what with Pesach and all. If I don't get any replies, I'll try this again in a week. But I'm thinking of it now.)

I think it's time for me to read.

I should probably aim for a mix of children's books (real young children) and books that are a little less, err, intellectually lame. I mean, most adults will tire pretty quickly of "see Dick run", and I'm no exception. I'm wondering if books with simpler vocabulary that are already familiar to me would be reasonable candidates -- things like The Little Prince or some of Aesop's fables or the like. I read that stuff in English as a young child (definitely fables before kindergarten), so it should be possible.

Anything I try to read has to have full nikud (vowels), at least for now. Larger print is a plus. And I'd like to be able to buy it by mail, to avoid funny looks in Pinsker's (or, worse yet, them assuming I have children).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

And no, I'm not interested in reading Harry Potter in Hebrew. Didn't read it in English; don't want to read it in another language. And anyway, it doesn't have nikud. :-)

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

You may also want to try newspapers; they'll have a more adult vocabulary and will probably give you more interesting "unfamiliar" words several times per article, but their writing is usually pretty simple, which means you're generally looking at unfamiliar words or idioms in text you can otherwise mostly follow rather than dense, completely foreign prose (like, say, a technical paper or scholarly essay in a field that doesn't borrow heavily from English.)

[goljerp]

... except newspapers don't have vowels. At least, I think that most Israeli newspapers don't. And that makes reading much harder.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

Ah, good point. I should have expected that (if nothing else, newspapers are going to go with the cheapest-to-typeset orthography they can), but it didn't occur to me (my own experience is with Portuguese.)

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

Good idea... I find newspapers helpful for language learning also. They can provide a moderate challenge, and for some reason I find news and current events more engaging as a topic than literature at a similar reading level.

[cellio]

I'd love to be able to attempt newspapers. I haven't seen one that prints the vowels yet, unfortunately. I'm told that most things aimed at adults don't, because you're assumed to have enough vocabulary to work it out from context. And adding vowels doubles the typesetting effort (= cost).

Hebrew is built around consonants. Each word can ultimately be boiled down to its root ("shoreish"), which is usually three letters. Changes in vowels convey changes in tense, subject, verb binyan (e.g. the difference between "tell" and "command"), and so on. Prefixes and suffixes serve related grammatical roles; sometimes they're also short words tacked on rather than standing alone. ("And" never stands alone, for instance; it's tacked onto the next word. That's what all those "v'something" words are -- "and something".)

Fluent people can read without the vowels because they have enough context to eliminate unlikely possibilities, and probably also because all those prefixes and suffixes help out. Without that context, though, I really need the vowels to stand a chance of parsing it.

I guess writing with vowels is sort of like spelling out every single abbreviation and shorthand would be in English. You, as s fluent reader, understand "conf call 3:00 w/CTO SCA Inc", for example. (I know; not a great example because of proper names. It was the best I could come up with quickly.)

[cellio]

I didn't do a very good job with explaining the stuff about roots. These guys do a better job while keeping it short.