Video Conferencing Software

How “At Home with Hebrew” was Created

Written by Neal Walters on December 29, 2008

When I first started learning Hebrew in 1994, most books jumped into teaching sentences and grammar, and only covered the Hebrew alphabet on one or two pages. You really cannot learn how to read Hebrew with just one or two pages of training. You really need a whole course dedicated to that subject.

Finally, I found an exercise book that was dedicated to just teaching a person to read the Hebrew letters. This book would teach one letter, and a few vowels in the first chapter. The second chapter would follow-up with the same letter, and add another letter and another vowel or two. In Hebrew, the vowels are written below or above the Hebrew letters, and they are called Nikud.

Using this system, I was able to master “site reading” of Hebrew. In other words, even if I didn’t understand the words I was reading, I could sound-out each word in the Sidur (prayer book) or the Hebrew Bible, or a Hebrew lesson book. The only problem was, sometimes I was still guessing and didn’t have anyone to confirm if my new reading abilities were correct or not.

Thus, I was left wanting more. If you are lucky to have a personal Hebrew tutor, then they can hear you pronounce a word or phrase, then they can correct any mistakes you make. But not everyone has the luxury of their own private Hebrew teacher. As a computer programmer, I thought that it would be be so much better to have a computer tutorial that would show the words, then let you try to pronounce them. After that, you would be able to click on the word, to confirm if you had pronunced it correctly or not. And thus, “At Home with Hebrew” was born.

A friend of mine helped me with the Hebrew fonts, and suggested a multimedia book-oriented tutorial program called “Toolbook”. I purchased and learned Toolbook, and slowly began to write my own Hebrew tutorial program. It was a big challenge and very time consuming. It probably took over two full years to get the product in the format that it is today.

One of the challenges was deciding the order in which to teach the Hebrew letters and vowels. Another challenge was just the shear volume of words that had to be keyed in the computer. There was no easy Hebrew word processor, so the data entry was a big challenge. The final challenge, was recording over 2700 Hebrew word and sound files, so that program would be able to pronounce each and every word.

Finally, the art work came together, and the progam changed from three diskettes (you don’t see those much any more) to a CD/ROM. I learned Microsoft Frontpage and began selling the program online, back when the world wide web was just in its infancy. After 10 years, I have literrally sold 100s of the program.

When I first started “At Home with Hebrew” in 1994, the concept of selling on the internet was still new; some people even questioned if it was legal. I learned Microsoft FrontPage and created the first version of my website, and over the years the site had grown to sell many other Hebrew tutorials. Our recent products include “Hebrew Kindergarten” and “Songs of the Shabbat”.

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