Hebrew Alphabet Basics

Reading Hebrew

Let's do a couple of examples:

You may click on the words to hear how they should sound

Hopefully you read this word as 'Delet' which incidentally means 'Door'.Taking it stage by stage. The first letter is a Daled which gives a 'D' sound.Underneath it is an 'e' sound. Putting them together, we get 'De' . The nextletter is a Lamed which gives a 'L' sound. Underneath it is also an 'e' sound.Putting them together we get 'Le'. So far we have DeLe. The last letter is aTaf. Because there is no vowel to it, we let is run in to the previous letter.Therefore the full word is 'DeLeT'.

Let's try another one:

This word should read 'Temuna. The first letter is Taf which has a T sound. The two dots below make it sound like the te in 'Term'. The Second and third letters go together as the 3rd letter Vav has an effect on how the Mem sounds. Together they sound 'moo' as in 'Moon'. The Noon has a line underneath which makes it have a 'na' sound. The Hey in this case is silent and doesn't have any real effect on the worderror