Easy Hebrew reading – can it be done?

In order to understand the above phrase, I want to deconstruct what the word “easy” actually means. According to the website www.dictionary.com, the definition of “easy” is not hard or difficulty; requiring no great labour or effort. Reading this definition makes me wonder if the above phrase “easy Hebrew reading” is a misnomer.

However, through my journey of learning Hebrew, specifically to reading Hebrew, I have come to the conclusion that “easy Hebrew reading” can be achieved. But, it needs to be specified that it will be achieved with perseverance and hard work.

However, on the other hand, someone else may say that hard work and perseverance isn’t needed, but all a person needs to do is get the transliteration of the text or learn it off-by-heart. Both these options helps the Hebrew reader appear to be reading Hebrew “fluently” and with “ease”, but not at all, they are merely pretending to read Hebrew.

To be able to achieve “easy Hebrew reading” one needs to learn the aleph-bet and vowels properly, so when presented with a Hebrew text, whether one is familiar with the text or not, he will be able to read it easily. Being an unfamiliar text, perhaps the reader will read it slowly, but with the skills he has armed himself with, definitely fluently.

To achieve fluency, the reader needs to be able to break up the words into syllables. An example of a syllable is a consonant and vowel, or for example, the shoorook at the beginning of a word, is also a separate syllable on its’ own.

There are others of course, however it is too complicated to teach this via a blog! This is a vital skill to achieve easy Hebrew reading. The course Easy Learn Hebrew helps the learner learn the aleph-bet, vowels and syllable breakups, thus allowing the student to reach his goal of easy Hebrew reading.