Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Hebrew alphabet is hard to learn, and this is a wonderful tool to learn it. After finishing it, you can continue your learning of either Modern Hebrew or Biblical Hebrew. However, some of the pronunciation in this tool is somewhat 'beautified' to a USA ear, and not really Modern Israeli Hebrew Accent. some examples: (1) letter 'resh' is pronounced /r/, but an Israeli does not pronounce it that way; (2) vowel 'tsere' is pronounced /ei/, but an Israeli pronounce it /e/. My suggestion is: use this to start, but after you finished, fine tuning your pronunciation by using other works such as: Colloquial Hebrew (Colloquial Series) Modern Hebrew for Beginners: A Multimedia Program for Students at the A Reference Grammar of Modern Hebrew (Reference Grammars) Then, you can download the Hebrew module of a free software 'byki'(google it). About 150 words and phrases are pronounced by native Hebrew speakers, you can follow and practice. Additional words are available(about 1000), but not for free, you have to pay for them. But even the 150 free words can do a lot. Finally, you may want to know the detailed rules of Hebrew Phonology. For this purpose, I recommend: Invitation to Biblical Hebrew: A Beginning Grammar (Invitation to Theological Studies Series) It is a first-year grammer for Biblical Hebrew, but even if you are learning Modern Hebrew, the ch1-ch9 would benefit you quite a lot, IMHO. Now I would add my reply to a comment of my review. I disagree the comment in two points: (1) He said hebrew is EASY to learn to read: mostly, it is. but: How to read a shewa? The effect of so many silent letters?(by the way, is letter 'He' silent? ) How to pronounce the abundant word connections? (when letter 'resh' after a silent shewa; when encoutering silent letters). These things bewildered me as a non-native speaker. The detailed rules for shewa is admittedly given up in the book of this set. (2) He recommend Sephardic pronounciation: the first two textbooks I listed in my review are from native Israeli speakers, both advocate an 'Israeli Hebrew', which seems to be the standard pronounciation of mordern colloquial Hebrew today. so why Sephardic?