This is an interesting book but it's not so much a beginner's language course as it is a reference grammar of modern Hebrew. Moreover, the grammar is presented in a way that will strike almost everyone who *has* studied Hebrew grammar (in school, or from every other book I've ever seen) as idiosyncratic.
For example, the classification of verbs into seven "binyanim" -- what could be called the cornerstone of most other college-level Hebrew textbooks -- is scarcely to be found at all. In its place you find "strong verbs" and "weak verbs". The strong verbs correspond to the traditional "qal" and "nif'al". The rest of the binyanim are subsumed under the "weak verbs", which Rosen further breaks down into three classes -- class 1 for pi'el and pu'al, class 2 for hitpael, and class 3 for hif'il and huf'al. But you have to read to chapter 41 to learn about that three-part taxonomy. In the mean time, Rosen has introduced most of the verb rules piecemeal. Gone are the familiar tables -- regular verbs, verbs that start with a guttural letter, or end in aleph, or have a yod in the middle, etc. I doubt I could have learned Hebrew verbs the way Rosen presents them, unless I collected all of his scattered rules and wrote my own conjugation tables.
There is another peculiarity which I think is even worse: the Hebrew is spelled without vowels ("points")! When vocabulary is introduced, it's shown in (unpointed) Hebrew alongside a phonetic transliteration in Latin letters. So whenever you see that Hebrew word -- then and there, or later -- you'll see it without vowels. To be sure, there's method, and not just madness, here; most road signs and virtually all restaurant menus, shop windows, newspapers and hand-written notes you see in Israel are like that -- no vowels. On the other hand, students with less than perfect memories will find themselves having to refer back to the transliterations when, instead, they could have been keeping their eyes a little longer on Hebrew letters and, in the process, building some skill at decoding the unfamiliar alphabet. And it gets even worse: there are entire pages with no Hebrew letters on them at all; Rosen will throw in a section on idiomatic expressions, and present them only in Latin letters. At that point, I think even the most diligent student would be hard-pressed to readily recognize those expressions if he were to see them in Hebrew, much less be able to write them out in correctly-spelled Hebrew.
The author, Haim Rosen, was a prominent Israeli academic linguist who popularized the idea of Israeli Hebrew as a distinct new language, whose many deviations from classical norms were to be taken not as mistakes or "substandard usage" but as the legitimate objects of serious study. That serious study was his career, and this book must be how, after much thought and rethinking Hebrew grammar forward and backward, he concluded Hebrew should be taught to beginners.
You might be able to make a go of it if your motivation is rock-solid, and you have patience for a lot of abstractly described grammatical terminology. The natural audience for this book, though, is probably not students at all but rather people who already know Hebrew, and who are interested in seeing what they already know presented in an innovative, often interesting, way.
For example, the classification of verbs into seven "binyanim" -- what could be called the cornerstone of most other college-level Hebrew textbooks -- is scarcely to be found at all. In its place you find "strong verbs" and "weak verbs". The strong verbs correspond to the traditional "qal" and "nif'al". The rest of the binyanim are subsumed under the "weak verbs", which Rosen further breaks down into three classes -- class 1 for pi'el and pu'al, class 2 for hitpael, and class 3 for hif'il and huf'al. But you have to read to chapter 41 to learn about that three-part taxonomy. In the mean time, Rosen has introduced most of the verb rules piecemeal. Gone are the familiar tables -- regular verbs, verbs that start with a guttural letter, or end in aleph, or have a yod in the middle, etc. I doubt I could have learned Hebrew verbs the way Rosen presents them, unless I collected all of his scattered rules and wrote my own conjugation tables.
There is another peculiarity which I think is even worse: the Hebrew is spelled without vowels ("points")! When vocabulary is introduced, it's shown in (unpointed) Hebrew alongside a phonetic transliteration in Latin letters. So whenever you see that Hebrew word -- then and there, or later -- you'll see it without vowels. To be sure, there's method, and not just madness, here; most road signs and virtually all restaurant menus, shop windows, newspapers and hand-written notes you see in Israel are like that -- no vowels. On the other hand, students with less than perfect memories will find themselves having to refer back to the transliterations when, instead, they could have been keeping their eyes a little longer on Hebrew letters and, in the process, building some skill at decoding the unfamiliar alphabet. And it gets even worse: there are entire pages with no Hebrew letters on them at all; Rosen will throw in a section on idiomatic expressions, and present them only in Latin letters. At that point, I think even the most diligent student would be hard-pressed to readily recognize those expressions if he were to see them in Hebrew, much less be able to write them out in correctly-spelled Hebrew.
The author, Haim Rosen, was a prominent Israeli academic linguist who popularized the idea of Israeli Hebrew as a distinct new language, whose many deviations from classical norms were to be taken not as mistakes or "substandard usage" but as the legitimate objects of serious study. That serious study was his career, and this book must be how, after much thought and rethinking Hebrew grammar forward and backward, he concluded Hebrew should be taught to beginners.
You might be able to make a go of it if your motivation is rock-solid, and you have patience for a lot of abstractly described grammatical terminology. The natural audience for this book, though, is probably not students at all but rather people who already know Hebrew, and who are interested in seeing what they already know presented in an innovative, often interesting, way.
(amazon.com: "63 people found this helpful")
