Free Hebrew lessons – March 2011 – Training – Day 61

Shalom,

In our previous lesson we talked about Japan and its tragedy.

Lately, there have been a lot of disasters, but we must always look forward to the future and hope the best for us and for our families.

Therefore, today we will talk about the future, and I also have a beautiful story for you at the end of the lesson…      
 

Today’s menu: Future tense

Attention: The underlined letters represent the accent.

In lesson 43 we learned about the Eitan letters, and I taught you how to conjugate the word “close” in the future tense for all of the English pronouns.

As I told you, in Hebrew every verb has a root, and in the future tense there are four possible prefix letters before the root.
If you learn them, you will be able to conjugate almost every Hebrew verb in the future tense.
The letters are: e, i, t and n, and in Hebrew the name of this group of letters is “Eitan.”

Today I will only give you some examples with some new verbs.
Let’s have fun today, and use a sentence from the beautiful Beatles song, “Close your eyes”…

“Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you, tomorrow I’ll miss you…”

A man speaking to a woman

1. Close your eyes – Tisgeri et ha’einaim shela^

   – Close – Tisgeri  
   – Your – Shela^
   – Eyes – Einaim

The word “close” in English is not in the future tense, but in Hebrew when I use “close” for “close your eyes,” or for any similar sentence, I use an imperative form.

Since in Hebrew we don’t use the imperative form very often, most of those words will be in the future tense. That’s why the word “close” for this example is in the future tense.

If you want to know how to say it in high (very proper) Hebrew, you can read the following explanation. Otherwise, simply go ahead and read the next paragraph.
For “tisgeri,” as an exception to what I said about the Eitan letters, I also can say “sigri.” Sigri is the imperative form of “tisgeri.”
For “ha’einaim shela^” (your eyes), I can say “einai^” which is only one word, so the whole sentence for “close your eyes” will be “sigri et einai^.”

Now leaving the high Hebrew aside, let’s learn the rest of the sentence:

2. And I’ll kiss you – Va’ani anashek ota^

   – And I – Va’ani
   – I will kiss – anashek (The prefix “a” indicates the first person, even though I already said “ani“.)
   – I will not talk about the “you” (ota^) today. We will talk about it in our next lesson.  It is not hard, it just needs some more detailed explanation. 

Here, for “anashek,” you can see that I used “a” instead of “e” for “I will kiss”. I don’t want to dwell on the reason, but in Hebrew it is always the same letter “alef,” translated as the “e” letter. In Heblish it will be either “e” or “a” depending on the root. 

So, to expand on the rule I taught you in lesson 43:
- For every verb in the future tense in Hebrew, we use one of the “Eitan” prefixes:  e, i, t or n before the root. For first person (singular) it will either e or a.

3. Tomorrow I’ll miss you – Ma^ar etgaagea elai^

   – Tomorrow – Ma^ar
   – I will miss – etgaagea
   – (I will miss whom? I will miss…) you – elai^

Now, here is the story I promised:
One of our famous Israeli writers, Meir Shalev, wrote a short article about his father.  Mr. Shalev’s story went something like this:  “In WWII my father volunteered in the British army. During his service, he shared a truck with another soldier, who was a devout Christian believer. Although he was a Jew, my father did not practice orthodox Judaism. When the Christian driver heard that his companion was from Jerusalem, he started talking to my father about the stories in the Bible. They drove four days; my non-orthodox Jewish father and the orthodox Christian, “together with” Abraham and Moses, Rachel and Sarah, King David and more heroes from the Bible.

The Christian driver, who knew a lot about the Bible, was surprised to discover how much my father knew about the Bible. At the end of the journey, when they arrived in Alexandria (Egypt), he hugged my father and said: “I knew that the Bible was translated to many languages, but I never dreamed that it was also translated into Hebrew…” ”

Lehitraot in lesson 62…

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Free Hebrew lessons – November 2010 – Training – Day 44

Shalom,

Let’s read a comment I recently received from Sylvie about one of our lessons (I think it was lesson 14):

Shalom
I was wondering about the use of “ani” in past tense. When you say “I wanted one dress”, “ratsiti simla a^at,” must you say “ani ratsiti simla a^at?” as in “I wanted one dress” compared to “wanted one dress”?
toda!

Think about this question, but meanwhile I want to remind you that in our previous lesson we had an important teaching about the future tense.

Today, I will try to answer Sylvie’s question, broadly.

Today’s menu: I – Past tense

Attention: The underlined letters represent the accent.

Let’s take a look at the verbs we learned in lesson 39:

When you are talking about yourself in the past tense, the suffix of every verb in Hebrew will be “ti.” 
The “i” in the suffix “ti” takes the place of the “i” in “ani,” indicating the first person.

 Let’s put it in a table (present tense and past tense – masculine and feminine):

Another interesting (and easy) thing about the first person past tense: notice that there is no difference between masculine and feminine. Both verbs in the first person past tense are the same. Go ahead, you can say it…. yippeeee!    

See, I told you this week would be easy, and after last week’s complex lesson, you probably needed a break.

I really recommend going back over last week’s lesson on the future tense. It is so important, and I’ll admit, a little difficult in the beginning.  Well, not really a beginning since we are almost a year together…

Lehitraot in lesson 45…

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Free Hebrew lessons – October 2010 – Training – Day 43

Shalom,

Today we have a long and very important lesson.
If you only have a few minutes, you can just read the summary at the end of the lesson, but if you really want to learn Hebrew, let’s start…

In our previous lesson we talked about Definite and Indefinite articles. I taught you that in Hebrew there is no indefinite article “a,” and I showed you that we use the sound “ha” (which is only one vowel in Hebrew), instead of the word “the.”

Today we will talk about the future…

It would be amazing if we could sit together and guess what the future has in store for us… but, we will leave that for astrologers and concentrate on our Hebrew lessons.     
BTW, here is one of my astrology websites.

Today’s menu: Future tense – Eitan letters

Attention: The underlined letters represent the accent.

Today we will talk about the future tense and we’ll taste a bit about “roots.”

We’re only going to use one verb for our examples today – close.
We learned this verb in lesson 39, and many of you did homework about it.

As you have already seen, in Hebrew we don’t use “am, are” and “is.” So, from now on I won’t need to write: “I am,” “you are,” “he is” etc… I will only use “I, you, he, we” etc. in my tables/examples.

Look at this table and read the following explanation.

Close – soger

Now, after you read the verbs in the table above, I will teach you the rules for future tense, step-by-step.

1. In Hebrew every verb has a root.
Most roots consist of 3 consonants.
At this point we won’t discuss word roots in detail, because the concept of word roots is not easy to understand, especially since I can’t show you the root letters in Heblish (meaning, in English letters).  However, one day we will try to learn more about roots.

The only thing I want to say about roots is that the root of the word “close,” (soger) is “s.g.r.”
What do I mean by that?

Look at the verbs above. You can easily find the letters “s,” “g” and “r” in each verb.  This is the root of the verb “soger.”
That’s true for past tense, present tense and future tense.

2. In the future tense, there are four possible prefix letters before the root.
If you learn them, you will be able to conjugate almost every Hebrew verb in the future tense.
The letters are: e, i, t and n, and in Hebrew the name of this group of letters is “Eitan.”
Most of the time we use these 4 prefixes as the Eitan letters.
 

In the future I will show you some exceptions.

Let’s look again. I capitalized the root’s letters “S,” “G” and “R” and bolded the four special prefix letters.

Close – soger

The rule:
In the future tense, there are four possible prefix letters before the root.
1) The letters are: e, i, t or n.
2) This rule is for all future tense Hebrew verbs, in all 7 Hebrew forms.
3) Every verb in the future tense must have one of the “Eitan” letters as the first letter of the word.

Here it is in detail.
Don’t try to remember it, yet. I will give an easy way to remember the rules.

   – For “I” (ani) we add the letter “e” before the root.
  
   – For “he” (m) (hu) and for
            “they” (m) (hem), we add the letter “i” before the root.

   – For “you” (m) and (f) singular and plural (ata, at, atem, aten) and for
            “she” (hi) and they (f) (hen), we add the letter “t” before the root.

   – For “we” (m) and (f) (ana^nu), we add the letter “n” before the root.

Here it is on a table:

Or simpler:

Summary (and a simple way to remember):

- For every verb in the future tense in Hebrew, we use one of the “Eitan” prefixes:  e, i, t or n before the root.
- The Eitan prefix letter will be always the first letter of the verb.
- This rule is for ALL 7 forms of verbs in Hebrew – meaning, all Hebrew verbs!

The best way to remember which of the Eitan prefixes to use is:

- First person (singular) – e
- First person (plural) – n

- Third person (masculine) – i

- All the others – t

Simple    

Is your head spinning?  Don’t be discouraged!  If you just keep studying the table and memorize which “Eitan” prefix letter goes with which personal pronoun, you will quickly master the future tense.

Lehitraot in lesson 44, I promise you an easier lesson…

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