Category: Language Study

It has finally happened! After so many years of thinking, planning, wishing I made the first part of my Hebrew course a reality. This is the pilot or beta stage of what will later be released as a much longer beginner Hebrew course. That course will probably run around 7-8…

Dear friends After a hiatus of two years, at least, I decided to post something here. A few years ago a reader chided me for not posting on a regular basis. He was right, of course, if I wanted to build a large audience. When people come to me as…

When I was growing up I heard Yiddish everywhere. It was in the air, in the water and especially in the food. I grew up in New York City. My first few years were in Mid-town Manhattan but my earliest memories come from the Bronx where my family lived in…

I have been posting book reviews on Amazon.com for over ten years and, until today, have never had one be rejected. After the review was rejected I resubmitted it cutting out the references to the CD collection which Amazon suggests I include to provide credibility. Instead I mentioned that I…

One of our readers, Julian, has asked ( comment, 19 July, 2012;  http://learnetarium.com/2011/09/22/learn-foreign-languages-by-having-fun-reading-part-2/) about the different attitudes of secular and orthodox Jews. He specifically wonders, “Are these tensions similar (not identical) with the feelings of the Maccabees and the Hellenised Jews back in antiquity? “ This is a good and…

Previous to meeting Michel Thomas in the mid-90’s, my experience in learning languages was entirely based on using books and, in some cases, having others instruct me using more traditional approaches. However, I could never really communicate in any of these languages. In fact, the very idea of comfortably conversing…

When Timothy Doner, a 12 year old boy in New York City, was being instructed in Biblical Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah, he became fascinated with the language. So he decided to learn Modern Hebrew. He bought a grammar book and found someone with whom to speak. In…

Since I was a young man I have been exposed to Hebrew. My parents sent me to a Hebrew school for many years during my pre-teen and teen years. I would finish public school and then go to this school which was held in a local synagogue two to three…

I once asked Michel Thomas about studying on my own. He urged me to read in the language I was studying. “Read what you enjoy and don’t look up words in a dictionary. Just keep on reading,” he told me. His advice was built on the fact that when we…