Smart Dummies Wanted

By SETH BROWN

Hebrew for Dummies
By Jill Suzanne Jacobs, MA
361 pages. Wiley. $24.99.
With an audio CD.

Hebrew for Dummies, in a word, isn't. Isn't for dummies, that is. The book, while perhaps easier to learn with than a standard language textbook, still requires a fair bit of work to wade through. But one expects to do a lot of work to start learning a language. Unlike a travel phrasebook just trying to help you find the bathroom, this book actually starts to teach you the language of Hebrew.

That being said, I was disappointed that it didn't tell you how to ask where the bathroom is. This is one of the first sentences I wanted to know in Hebrew, after "Ani lo medaber Ivrit" (I don't speak Hebrew). Thankfully, you will learn how to ask people if they speak English early on, which will come in handy until you progress further into the book.

The beginning of the book has a laundry list of the letters and vowels, followed by chapters containing thematically organized lists of vocabulary in context. Happily, unlike most language books, almost all of these themes are conceivably useful, ranging from ordering food to small-talk about the weather. Sadly, as with most language books, one can't imagine actual human beings carrying on half of the conversations which are scripted in the book:

"It's quite hot today, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's quite hot. At least there's no humidity at the beach."

"Yes, I don't enjoy humidity. It's very humid in town."

"Yes, I know. There's a heat wave now."

"That's true..."

Still, even if the conversations themselves are sometimes insipid, the vocabulary and pronunciation are useful.

The book comes with a CD filled with tracks of authentic Hebrew speakers reading the conversations. Anyone who has seen the awful transliterations in a Passover Haggadah knows that pronunciation guides are no substitute for hearing the Hebrew tongue as it is supposed to be spoken. After listening to some of the conversations a few times, I began to feel like I could pronounce a few words correctly, or at least well enough that an Israeli might conceivably understand me. The CD clips offer a complete reading of the conversation followed by space between each phrase so you can practice speaking.

While the words and conversations are fairly standard for a language-learning book, the cultural bits are what make this book different. Some of the translations I take exception to, like the author's definition of "chutzpah" as "attitude". This is simply an insufficient translation, which frankly I think shows some chutzpah on her part. And while we learn that "sabra" means "native Israeli", it isn't mentioned that the sabra is also a desert cactus, from which the other meaning is derived.

Still, there is a wealth of cultural information dispersed throughout the book. Using the vocabulary as a leaping-off point, bizarre tangents range from a list of Hebrew film recommendations to the story of the creation of the word for telephone: the Academy for Hebrew Language dubbed it a "Sach-Rachok" (literally, "long-distance conversation"), but this didn’t catch on with the public, who preferred "Telefone", the word used today. And the last few chapters of the book focus on the only Hebrew that many of us have spoken—prayers and other words used around Jewish holidays. It's nice to see the Sh'ma and remember that at least I can speak a little Hebrew.

After two weeks of lightly reading through this book, I’ll confess that I still don't speak Hebrew in any useful way. But that’s because as previously mentioned, truly learning Hebrew would take at least a few months of constant study, and that's just to get through the basics. Still, with the CD to listen to I can at least fake the accent well enough to fool people that don't speak Hebrew. And if I get caught, I at least now know how to excuse myself: “S'licha.”