The Hebrew Alphabet is bad

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#hebrew

00:00 - Introduction
2:43 - Alphabet or Abjad?
4:16 - Going down letter by letter
7:58 - Other annoying things
10:12 - Examples
13:20 - It is what it is

[arnorrian]

Bless the ancient Greeks for inventing vowel signs.

[DoctorFatman]

> In Russian we call this “пиздец”.
I laughed out loud and hard at this. Thanks!

[EbrahimHasan]

As a native Arab, I see that many of these problems arise from the fact that some letters lost the original pronunciations in Hebrew. That's why when I learn a word like tekes, I can't possibly misspel it, because in Arabic, we have the same word with the same spelling and meaning but the t is not the usual t, nor is the k. This is a great aid in memorising Hebrew words. Just the knowledge of Arabic gives a huge unfair advantage.

[tayebizem]

As someone who speaks Arabic fluently in a native level
Hebrew does make sense
The worst thing that the pure semitic sounds of some letters was lost in the European jewish communities

[michalmonstrov]

And then there's the Yiddish spelling which does the same letters just better. Great content btw!

[jc.]

As a learner of Arabic who decided to look at Hebrew for fun to see the similarities, the writing system is what scared me off. I could successfully read Arabic with educated guesses after only about a month, but Hebrew I can’t even keep track of what sounds a character makes and the redundancy makes it worse 😭

[ilaimakesmusic]

as a native hebrew speaker who grew up rarely writing and had to learn individual words at a later age, i came up with a few strategies for these irregularities (which are valid at least in native hebrew words)

1) alef/ayin (word-initially or medially): unfortunately, this one is guesswork. try alef though, it's slightly more common

2) alef/ayin/he (word-finally): he is waaay more common than alef. word-final alef is usually only found when it is part of the root or in aramaic loanwords. word-final ayin makes an extra /a/ sound after the final vowel, so unless the final vowel is /a/, you can tell if it's an ayin. this way you can differentiate between /ho'dia/ <הודיע> and /hoda'ja/ <הודיה>

3) soft bet/vav: if /v/ appears word-initially, it's written with a vav. if it appears word-finally, it's probably a bet

4) hard kaf/kuf: if /k/ appears word-finally, it's written with a kuf (except some arabic loanwords and some acronyms)

5) soft kaf/khet: if /x/ appears word-initially, it's written with a khet. also, word-final khet adds an /a/ before it (like ayin). this way, you can differentiate between /o'reax/ <אורח> and /'orex/ <אורך>

6) samekh/sin: samekh is much more common. if you have to guess, guess samekh

7) tet/tav: mostly guesswork, but affixes with /t/ are written with tav. the only case in which /t/ in an affix is written with a tet is in special cases in the hitpa'el stem in which tav becomes tet

it's hellish, but you learn to get by :) hope this helps!

[CarlosAvila-etko]

I speak Spanish, my mother language. I speak English. I learned it in Boston after living there for 15 years. I learned Haitian Creole in 2003. I can speak, read and write French. In 2014 I started to learned Japanese. I can speak it, and I can read it and write it in Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.
I just started to learn how to read Hebrew, and I find your video very funny.
Keep it up.

[nathanielmartins]

Knowing the history of words in the Semitic family really makes the nonsense comprehensible. It is as one linguist put it once "If you want to understand a semitic language, understand Arabic first, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble"

[valerioluizfelipe]

That's why I really like Arabic script. You can go wrong with it without the harakat, but not to the point where a k turns into a kh or an s turns into a sh. Arabic consonants are trustworthy.

[SgtRocko]

I speak both Hebrew and Yiddish (and am learning Ladino) - but Yiddish is my first language (I think in it) - and we have a Yiddish-only rule here at home. Front door closes, no more English. As a kid, I lived in Birobidzhan, USSR - the Soviets simplified the Hebrew/Yiddish alefbeis - no final letters, no Hebrew-only letters like Veis, Tov and Sov, and all words from Hebrew were spelled phonetically. All books, the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern, and the magazine Sovetish Hejmland were printed using the Soviet orthography. Not going to lie, it was a lot easier to read! LOL When the USSR collapsed, that orthography was dropped. My daughter-in-law is from Corfu, from a family that still speaks Ladino as their first language (my Yiddish-speaking son & her have it mandated in their K'suveh that their kids will speak Yiddish and Ladino, THEN learn Hebrew later (they live in Israel). ANYHOW... they write Ladino with another modified Hebrew alefbeis that's halfway between Hebrew and Yiddish - though apparently that's only common in Israel now, as in Greece, Turkey, Bosnia, etc. they use Roman letters (apparently the Turks mandated they switch).

[a.c.]

as someone who's learning Hebrew I feel vindicated that someone else hates how confusing vav is

[WeibenWang]

I taught myself the Hebrew alphabet teaching myself some Yiddish, which I can sort of read, mostly because it sounds like German, though by painstakingly sounding it out. Yiddish, at least with the standard sort of spelling, fixes most of the problems you talk about. It writes *all* the vowels. There's only one t, k, s, etc., for "native" word at lest; words from Hebrew are spelled like Hebrew. My problem is too many characters look alike, daled looks resh, vov looks like zayin looks like final nun, bet looks like kaf, mem looks like samech, etc. The differences are just a little tick, or a square vs. rounded corner, which depending on the font and size of text can be very hard to see. And for someone like me who can't really read, but sounds things out letter by letter, it's infuriating not being able to tell the letters apart.

[iroquoianmapper]

Well, I'm glad you're back and making videos again.
I studied Hebrew myself for a while, but I don't remember it well, although I sometimes read it.

[radubradu]

When I started learning hebrew I expected a very easy writing system, because I thought surely they would reform the writing system so it would be easier for all the people from different linguistic backgrounds needing to learn the language. Boy was I wrong. It's a shame because it was a great opportunity. Once you have millions of books written in it, it's very hard to reform.

[solsang]

Finnish is almost 100% phonetic, only changing now with young peoples dialectization, yet normal official Finnish writing is a joy since you can speak and write correctly just after learning each letter sound

[whycantiremainanonymous]

4:00: That box on the left is hillarious! For those not in the know, it's part of a standard form employees in Israel have to fill in every year for tax purposes, and this particular box has such convoluted and unclear terminology that nobody really knows how to fill it in correctly. A great illustration!

[yoavboaz]

The main advantage of a single letter having 2 sounds is that the sound might change based on the conjugation of the word. Take כתבתי/katavti/ (I was writing) and אכתוב/eχtov/ (I will write). In one כ makes a k sound and in the other כ makes a h sound. When reading you will immediately recognize they are both of the root כ.ת.ב, (writing)

[VaderFuntime]

When talking about all the et's and at's you could have added:
עת - time
את (חפירה) - shovel

[danieloehler]

You are wrong! Hebrew is quite a good alephbet compared to others.
I have learned several alphabets of the Middle East. And I can tell You that the Hebrew one is the most usable to print. It is way more difficult to print Arabic or old Syriac. Middle Egyption - the Hieroglyphs - has hundreds of signs. Cuneiform as in old Ugaritic is a bit more complicated.
Unlike English the letters show the spoken sound quite well.
The only trouble for beginners is with the short vocals.
But if You are keen on writing fast - kind of stenographic - it might be a very good Alphabet, provided one is able to write evry letter it as fast as a latin letters.