Is Hebrew Hard to Learn? Here’s the Real Answer

Hebrew is a fascinating, ancient language. As the only tongue worldwide to be fully and successfully revived from extinction, it’s a linguistic one-of-a-kind and not quite like anything else out there.

But is Hebrew hard to learn? Plenty of curious students ask themselves this question, so today I want to clear things up a bit and try to answer it as best I can.

While Hebrew can indeed be difficult to master and it might take you some time to reach fluency, the point of this guide is also to dispel some doubts and common preconceptions you may have and to show you how to make learning Hebrew easier for yourself – no matter where you might be coming from!

A word on the idea of ‘difficult languages’

First off, let me make one thing clear: there’s no language on Earth that is impossible for you to learn. I can say that despite having no clue about your linguistic background or learning strategy, because it is a simple fact! 

No human being is incapable of learning any particular language, and no language is ‘too difficult’ in a way that could prevent you from learning it properly. That’s because the concept of ‘difficulty’ in linguistic terms is very subjective and abstract at best, and it depends on a lot of factors that can differ from person to person.

Hebrew is no different. Yes, some students may face certain difficulties with the language, and we will go over many of those down below. But in the end, if you dedicate yourself to your goal and use the right learning strategies, there’s no reason why you would not be able to become fluent in Hebrew, or anything else you set your mind to!

Why is Hebrew hard to learn?

1. You’ll need to learn a new writing system

Hebrew uses a writing system known as the aleph-bet, named after its first two letters. In print, the most common script is כתב אשורי, the “Assyrian script”, but many different cursive scripts exist for handwriting as well.

While the aleph-bet itself ultimately stems from the same roots as Latin, namely ancient Phoenician (if you squint, aleph-beit doesn’t sound so different from the Greek alfa, beta), the way its letters function and form words might seem very foreign to many learners.

Just to give you one idea of how different that can be: all of Hebrew is written entirely right-to-left, not left-to-right! 

2. …And a very tricky vowel system to boot!

One of the reasons why Hebrew is so hard to learn has got to do with how it treats vowels. You might have noticed how I am refraining from calling the aleph-bet an alphabet, despite the obvious etymological relationship between the two. 

There’s a good reason for that: according to many linguists, they’re different things!

The Hebrew writing system is, to be precise, an abjad. This means that all the letters represent consonants (which are defined somewhat differently from how we see consonants in English). Vowels, on the other hand, exist as sounds, and they even have names – but there aren’t any vowel-letters.

Learning how to “read” vowels that aren’t explicitly written might sound impossible, but in truth it’s very doable. The millions of fluent Hebrew speakers worldwide are a testament to that fact if anything!

3. Hebrew is highly gendered

Unlike English, where grammatical gender hardly exists outside of the scope of talking about people or animals, everything in Hebrew is gendered.

And I really do mean everything. Every noun has its gender. Verbs conjugate differently based on gender – that of the speaker, and that of the subject, with different gendered conjugations for every single person, singular and plural. Adjectives have to match the gender and number of their noun, to boot!

All that put together means there are a dizzying number of forms for Hebrew words, which to a native English speaker (or even to, say, an Italian speaker, whose language recognizes gender but doesn’t use it as extensively), this can come off as hyper-complex. 

4. The diversity in registers and styles is huge

Hebrew is, to put it mildly, ancient. With its literary corpus going all the way to the Tanakh (that best-selling epic novel you might know better as ‘the Bible’), it’s a language that’s grown and changed over the course of millennia.

As a result, there are countless styles and registers of speech and writing in Hebrew. Even though Hebrew lacks separate formal and informal pronouns or verb conjugations, for example, there are still varying degrees of both formal and casual speech that can be important in some social situations.

To speak Hebrew, then, can become quite an overwhelming task. To be fluent in the day-to-day language of a secular, expat-friendly neighborhood of Tel Aviv might not be enough to prepare you for reading and understanding Mishnaic literature, or even Modern Hebrew poetry!

Hence, you should try to familiarize yourself throughout your learning journey with the different kinds of linguistic registers that Hebrew speakers use, and pick some targets that suit your own goals.

5. You probably won’t recognize most of the words

Being a Semitic language, Hebrew belongs to the Afro-Asiatic family. That means the vast majority of its vocabulary is not shared with Indo-European languages such as English, Hindi, French, Russian, and others. 

Having to learn new words from scratch that would be easily recognizable in other foreign tongues can feel defeating, but it’s definitely not impossible! One small consolation: if you speak Arabic, modern Aramaic, or even Amharic, you will have a much easier time than most other Hebrew learners. 

These languages, while not related closely enough to Hebrew to be mutually intelligible, do share a significant amount of vocabulary roots, so you might be able to more easily remember new Hebrew words based on similar ones you already know.

6. Verb conjugations can appear counter-intuitive

The way Hebrew conjugates words is typically Semitic. Again, this means that mostly only Arabic speakers and some others will likely have an easy time with it right off the bat.

Hebrew words are composed of a few individual levels, or components. There are the roots as the most basic element, which are combinations of three, sometimes four letters that define the “family” in terms of broad meaning or context that a word belongs to.

Each verb root exists in many conjugation patterns – these are known as בניינים in Hebrew, or “buildings”. You conjugate by putting the word root of your choice into the pattern that corresponds to the meaning you’re looking for, and then adjusting for tense, number and so on.

For example, the root ח־מ־ם includes a lot of individual words that are all related to heat. Pick the פועל verb pattern for this root in the third person singular, and you arrive at חומם: “heated up”.

7. “To be” or no “to be”? 

In English and many other languages from plenty of linguistic families, we thankfully have the verb “to be” in its many forms to communicate to us elements of tense as well as the relations between different types of words and their roles in the sentence.

In Hebrew, none of this applies. “To be” doesn’t truly exist! The verb להיות can be used to talk about the idea of existence, and it helps in conjugating the past and future tenses. But in the grammatical present, where the vast majority of Hebrew interactions take place, “to be” is pretty much absent.

This, of course, has wide ramifications across the whole of Hebrew grammar, far beyond just changing one word in certain sentences here or there. As a result, and especially because of how prevalent grammatical “to be” is in other languages, it often takes students quite a while to adjust.

8. The “את” might induce some frustration at first

And no, I don’t actually mean a shovel (which, incidentally, is also called את in Hebrew, though totally unrelated)!

Hebrew has a few grammatical features that are entirely unique to it, even in comparison with other Semitic languages. One of these is the את, something linguists call a particle that is added to sentences to show subject-object relationships. 

For example, many Hebrew beginners find themselves saying phrases like אני אוהב האוכל הזה, which, according to English logic, should mean “I like this food”. 

However, the above way of saying this in Hebrew is actually incorrect! 

You need to add an את, making the sentence אני אוהב את האוכל הזה. 

The את signifies that the food, האוכל, is the direct object in this sentence, preventing possible misunderstandings (remember the lack of “to be”? This is one of the areas where it becomes important). Though simple at face value, the lack of anything comparable to את in other languages makes it a well-known pet peeve among those studying Hebrew.

9. It can be hard to practice outside of Israel

Spoken by just under 6 million native speakers worldwide, Hebrew is not a rare, though certainly a pretty uncommon language. 

However, you have to take into account that its distribution worldwide is also far from uniform: the vast majority of Hebrew speakers live in Israel and the United States. Outside of those two countries, you might have a very hard time indeed finding any native speakers to interact with to practice your skills.

10. Letters do not always sound the same

By and large, Hebrew is a phonetic language. There are no special diphthongs, double letters don’t exist as such, and letters don’t randomly change their sound like they often do in English (looking at you, tough and though).

On the other hand, there is a caveat. A few of the aleph-bet’s letters come in multiple forms, which look the same (unless you add a special diacritic to distinguish them, which few native speakers do), but sound different.

‎This can add a certain layer of difficulty to pronouncing words that feature any of these letters. And in case you had enough of the root system already, you might not want to hear that these hard-soft states are interrelated with the root patterns of each word!

11. There are tons of pronunciation rules that can throw you off

Apart from self-explanatory regularities, Hebrew also features a large number of incredibly precise, yet rarely-taught pronunciation rules that can further complicate both speaking and listening practice.

For example, the initial letters of a word can often change forms depending on the letters surrounding them, which results in otherwise identical words sounding very different in different contexts.

For example, the word for “all” or “every”, כל, is usually pronounced sort of like “call”. 

ו-, which is a prefix that means “and”, is usually “veh”. And ב-, another prefix that means something like “in”, or “with”, sounds like “beh”. 

However, put all these three together to mean “and in every” (as in “and in every one of these examples”), and you get ובכל, which is not pronounced “veh beh call”, but rather “oovhkhol”!

This unpredictable behavior means that Hebrew requires you to have a solid grounding in the written script in order to understand how words behave when spoken.

12. Hebrew can be a bit too rich for its own good

As an ancient language, Hebrew has continuously grown and changed over thousands of years of continuous existence.

One obvious showcase of this fact is just how many synonyms and alternate phrases there are in Hebrew for, well, just about anything! Even a very basic word like “for” can range from ל- to עבור, למטרת, בשביל, לקראת, למען, בעד, and many more!

This sheer richness in vocabulary, ranging from Tanakhic expressions to modern-day neologisms, can be amazing when used right in poetry and literature. At the same time, it can also hopelessly confuse an unprepared Hebrew learner!

Why Hebrew can be very easy to learn

1. The root system can be your best study buddy

I talked earlier about many of the difficulties associated with the Hebrew root system. For sure, these difficulties are real – though I have to add that at the same time, a lot of them are exaggerated.

Many lesser-quality Hebrew guides and free courses online will tell you that the only way to grasp the root system as a non-native speaker is to learn it by heart – every single conjugation, every pattern, every root, and every word. That’s completely misguided and will likely only frustrate those who attempt it!

Instead, use roots to your advantage. If you know that the פ־ר־ס־ם root relates to “publishing” or “fame”, then that gives you an opportunity to learn a bunch of words at once. 

From מפורסם (“famous”) to פרסום (“public announcement”) and פרסומת (“advertisement”), each root usually harbors at least a small handful of closely related words, allowing you to strategically grow your Hebrew vocab!

2. Hebrew tenses are simple

Unlike Italian, a language considered easy for English speakers to learn which nonetheless offers a staggering 21 tenses (!), Hebrew only has three tenses related to time — present, past, and future. 

There are two more not related to time, an imperative tense and a passive tense, but that’s really it! Conjugating for these tenses is also very regular, with only mild exceptions and special cases.

3. There are plenty of great learning resources out there today

Though it’s true that the supply of Hebrew learning materials is less extensive than for many more popular and widespread languages, things are much better nowadays than they used to be.

There are plenty of powerful apps to learn Hebrew that you can use for guided learning, for example. I also invite you to check out our list of the best Hebrew books!

Even distance is no more as big of a problem as it used to be. By signing up for online Hebrew tutoring, a language exchange, or similar opportunities, you can also get in some time for face-to-face interaction with native Hebrew speakers no matter where you may live.

4. Hebrew is a language of patterns

If you can take away one thing from my description of Hebrew grammar, it should be that it’s based on a system of patterns. From the vowel system to verb conjugation and from the word roots to the בניינים and plenty of features of the language I didn’t even have the time to mention, a lot of Hebrew is fundamentally pattern-based!

This can make it seem overwhelming to a newcomer, but at the same time it’s also an amazing advantage. By familiarizing yourself with these basic patterns, you can quickly train yourself to recognize the meaning of new words and phrases easily, even ones you have never encountered before.

This means that for many people, the Hebrew learning curve drops off sharply and considerably past a certain introductory period.

Conclusion

I hope that this guide didn’t just give you an idea of why Hebrew is hard to learn, but also some helpful inspiration for making your journey a bit easier!

In the end, it’s like I said: no language is too difficult, no matter where you’re coming from, and every language has its own little tricky features that make it unique!

What did you find most difficult about studying Hebrew? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments down below!