Distinguishing i and o sounds in writing?

Question

I’ve just started learning Hebrew about 5 days ago (aiming to learning Biblical Hebrew so I can read the Bible in its original language). I spent a few days learning the writing system and practicing pronunciation. I’m now practicing by learning some Hebrew words to help solidify the writing system in my brain. One thing I’ve had a little trouble adapting to is figuring out the reading of a word I don’t know. So it seems Hebrew, like with English, how you pronounce a character changes from word to word, therefore you have to know a word to say you know its reading. It’s maybe slightly more ambiguous to a learner than English is because vowels aren’t written. So my question is, is there a trick to guessing how to read a word? Specifically, how to tell what vowel goes with a consonant? I know a yod can help indicate an i sound, but a vav can help indicate both an o or u sound without any niqqud indicators. I thought there might be some kind of trick, like how in English, an E following a C can indicate it’s pronounced like an S. Etc... Anyway, thank you for your time.

Answer 1

In Hebrew you often cannot know how a word is pronounced unless the niqqud (vowel markings) are present. There are very few "tricks", but the common vowel patterns with different types of words become more obvious as you become more fluent in the language. Here are a couple other tricks that even a beginner can recognize:

a word ending with an ayin (ע) always ends with the vowel sound "ah"

a word ending with a chet (ח) always ends with the guterall sound "ch" and the vowel "ah" preceding it. (ach/akh)

This one doesn't apply for Biblical Hebrew... but the letters ב כ פ always have a dagesh on the front of a word and never do on the end of a word. So they would be vocalized as "p" "k" "b" at the beginning of a word and "f" "ch/kh" "v" on the end of a word. (exceptions to this are words we use in modern Hebrew that are borrowed from foreign languages)