The reference shelf
These are the things I keep open while I teach: the Tanakh with its vowel points, the roots that most Hebrew vocabulary is built on, the grammar explanations I write when a student asks a question a textbook answered badly, and a word a day in each language. They started as handouts and outgrew what a handout can hold.
Read as much of it as you want. Nothing here asks you to sign in.
Family history
Gravestones, old letters, and the Yiddish your family spoke.
Hebrew dates, read and converted
Type the date off a gravestone or an old letter as it is written, abbreviations and all, and get the civil date and weekday with the letters added up. It also turns a civil date into the Hebrew one.
Which Yiddish did your family speak?
Where each side came from, and a word you remember them saying: gut or git, Moyshe or Meyshe. Thirty seconds, and you know whether they spoke Litvish, Poylish or Ukrainish.
How to read a Hebrew gravestone
The layout top to bottom, the name formula, kohen and levi, the date in letters, with a stone worked through line by line.
Reading an old Yiddish family letter
The cursive letters that look alike, the old spellings, the abbreviations after every name, the dates, and how letters open and close.
Hebrew and the Bible
Modern Hebrew as it is spoken, and the Hebrew of the Tanakh.
The Tanakh in Hebrew
The whole Bible with the vowel points, verse by verse, English alongside. Read the Hebrew first and check yourself against the translation line by line.
The root explorer
Learn three letters and you get a family of words instead of one. Each root here has its whole family, the binyan of every verb, and the verse it comes from.
Modern Hebrew grammar, explained
How reading works, the vowel chart, gender and plurals, the seven binyanim, and the phrases for a first lesson. Written the way I explain it at the table.
Biblical Hebrew grammar, explained
Qatal, yiqtol and wayyiqtol, the stems, the construct state, and Genesis 1:1–3 read word by word.
A Hebrew word each day
Spoken Israeli Hebrew: how it is pronounced, and a sentence from the way people talk rather than the way textbooks write.
A Biblical Hebrew word each day
A word taken from the text itself, with the verse it sits in and what it is doing there.
Yiddish
The language, its sounds, and a word a day.
A Yiddish word each day
One word with its transliteration, a sentence somebody would really say, and a woodcut. Yesterday’s are all still there.
Litvish and Chassidish: how they sound
The four vowels that separate the two, where each is spoken today, and where the YIVO standard fits.
Yiddish grammar, explained
Reading the alef-beys, word order, the tenses, the three cases, the Hebrew component, and a first text to read. Short pages, one question each.
Aramaic
The language of the Gemara.
About the shelf
I am Yaacov. I grew up in Jerusalem and I teach Hebrew, Yiddish, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, mostly to people who are reading something specific and got stuck. Most of what is on this page exists because a student asked me something and the answer was too long to fit in a message.
There is more than this. Students get a practice app on the other side of the login — flashcards, reading with the vowels switchable, conjugation drills — and some of them also sit down with me once a week. Both of those cost money, and the pricing page has the figures if you ever want them. Reading the shelf costs nothing and always will, and there is no sequence here you are supposed to move through.
Yaacov, native Jerusalemite
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