Most difficult Aspect of hebrew

Question

Shalom everyone! I know that a common question on language learning forums is "how hard is x language to learn." Usually, I can guage it, because I speak French, Esperanto and German fluently, have dabbled in many others, and study linguistics. However, I can't really guage Hebrew's difficulty that well. Of course, because it's a semitic language, one may say it's a lot harder than more commonly learned foreign languages, but is that true? German has plural forms out the wazoo, French has the subjonctif and many irregular conjugations. Word accent in Russian is unpredictable.. What does Hebrew have that is difficult? Word construction? Verbs? Prepositions? Are there even irregular verbs? I get that there's different binyanim, but do any of these have irregular verbs? What's the hardest part about learning Modern Hebrew for you guys?

Answer 1

The Foreign Service Institute ( https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/ ) has a chart showing the approximate time it takes an English language learner to learn lots of foreign languages to a certain uniform level. They have German at 30 weeks or 750 hours and Hebrew at 44 weeks or 1100 hours.

Irregular verbs in Hebrew are determined by the root letters. If there's a weak letter like a vav, a yud, a nun, or a hey, the letter can disappear in the conjugation. Sometimes these changes are inconsistent as well, because the words might date from different periods in the language when these rules were applied differently. So in addition to memorizing the basic patterns for conjugations, you also have to understand the way that these letters affect the conjugations. Sometimes that means applying multiple rules at once if you have a word that has, say, a nun AND a hey. Also, the specific type of changes that occur depends on where the letter occurs in the root and that's also something you have to memorize. Also, sometimes these kinds of phonological variations do not follow predictable patterns. We have sh.m.r > eshmor ("I will guard"), but l.m.d becomes "elmad" ("I will learn").

Another challenging thing about Hebrew is that the words often don't mean what you would predict based on their binyan. Many, many words have a grammatical form suggesting they should be causative or passive, but they're actually not. Maybe there was some way of conceptualizing it like that early in the language, but it was lost to modern speakers who no longer think of it that way. So the binyanim are not totally predictable.

With that being said, I don't think Hebrew is as hard as some languages in the same level. It's not on the chart because it's not a modern language, but I think Latin is harder than Hebrew.

Answer 2