hebrew

HEBREW THREAD

Ask your questions! I will answer!

Question to you though, how do you describe the word
את
(ET)?

as in: (tisgor ET hadelet)
Close the door

I'm having trouble explaining it in english. I just use it cause it feels right, if that makes sense.

I don't speak hebrew, but the word את seems to closely correspond to the word "the" in English, and we call the word "the" a "definite article".  This is because it's just one of those tiny parts of speech which specifies a particular direct object.  Compare with the indefinite article "a" or "an" which refers to a general object.  "A balloon" could mean any balloon on Earth, whereas "the balloon", you're talking about a specific balloon in a particular context.

The prefix (ha) translates to (the) in english, I'm pretty sure of that.
I can't figure out the difference between:

Tisgor ET (ha)delet
Close the door
and

Hoo (ha)melech

he is the king.

Why is the Alefbet such a mess and what is the easiest way to learn this mess?
The way I see it you must learn the pronounciation and writing for every word?

>>4
English spelling is waaaay more complicated, believe me.

>>4
If you were to provide some more specific examples I could help you out.
Really, I personally don't see it as much harder than english- sure there are a few letters that seem obsolete, but you soon learn that they serve different purposes.

Pronunciation is also memorized in english to a certain extent (meaning it isn't phonetic), you just become so accustomed to it that you can read without even thinking about it.
In hebrew there are "nekkudot"-markings around letters- to help you out at first with the pronunciations. I highly recommend you start with those.

>>6
I don't really have a specific example, it's just the everday writing without punctuation.
English has stuff like the gh for example, but it doesn't just leave out all its vowels.

>>7
Any English speaker that has half a brain could say that English is one of the most complicated and malformed languages alive.
Really a shame that it's the most common. :/

As for learning English, I'd start with things like sentence structure, seeing as there are SO MANY DAMN WAYS TO WRITE EVERYTHING. But I don't speak Hebrew or know it in the least, so I can't give any other real advice.

Of course, this is all assuming that you need some advice, the grammar used in this thread is pretty good and doesn't seem like translator-speak.

>>8
As a german native I found English to be very easy to understand, but I did have great exposure to it from age 7.
I do agree that it's malformed, but it isn't complicated.
Sentence structure is really easy, as there actually are very few ways to write stuff, for example the position of the subject and the object are relatively fixed, adverbial phrases that designate time of an event always go at the end or the beginning of a sentence and so on. Now compare that to a slavic language that has like 7-8 cases and three genders.