How to Learn the Top 100 Essential Hebrew Words: 97 Flashcards of Pure Grammar Glue

CJ1979 — Hebrew Vocabulary: Top 100 Essential Words contains 97 cards, English on the front, unpointed Hebrew on the back. Before you start, know what it is: a frequency list harvested from subtitles, which means it is almost entirely function words. There are no numbers past אחד, no food, no days, no colours, no directions — and, in a deck called essential, no שלום and no סליחה. תודה and בבקשה are the only two courtesy words in it.

That is not a reason to skip it. Function words are exactly what beginners lack, and this deck front-loads the connective tissue of spoken Hebrew.

A sample of the real cards

You will drill: לא, אני, אתה, הוא, היא, אנחנו, הם, מה, מי, למה, איך, כמה, אם, אבל, או, כי, רק, גם, עוד, יותר, מאוד, הרבה, פשוט, נכון, טוב, כל, כמו, עם, על, של, אל, שם, כאן, עכשיו, לפני, עד, אז, כך, משהו, דבר, זמן, פעם, יש, אין, רוצה, יכול, יודע, חושב, עושה, הולך, אומר, נראה, להיות, היה, הייתי, יהיה.

The gender trap

Hebrew marks gender in the present tense, and this deck is inconsistent about it. Two verbs get both forms — יודע / יודעת (cards 27, 65) and יכול / יכולה (30, 91). Five others are given in the masculine only, unlabelled: צריך, חושב, הולך, אומר, נראה. The pronouns do the same thing: אתה is masculine you, and את is absent; אתם is masculine plural, אתן absent; הם is there, הן is not.

Tip 1: go through those five verb cards and rewrite each back as a pair (הולך / הולכת). Add את, אתן and הן as one card. Ten minutes, and you stop half-learning a gendered language.

Fifteen cards, three patterns

Nine cards teach one possessive paradigm — של, שלי, שלך, שלו, שלנו — and four more teach the dative one: לי, לך, לו, לנו. Then five cards glue the subordinator ש- onto pronouns you already know: שאני, שאתה, שהוא, שזה, שלא (plus ואני for the conjunction ו-).

Tip 2: collapse them into two tables and one rule card (ש- = that, prefixed). You go from fifteen cards to about five and free up the reps for what the deck never gave you: שלום, סליחה, the numbers to ten, and the days of the week. Do the same for the copula, scattered across להיות, היה, הייתי and יהיה — one table, and note the thing no card says, that Hebrew has no present-tense to be at all.

Three backs to correct

• Card 2 glosses אתך as you (obj.). It is not — אתך is with you (את plus a suffix). The object form is אותך, which is card 32.
• Card 32 labels אותך as feminine. Unpointed, it is both: otkha to a man, otakh to a woman.
• Card 74 glosses האם as the (question). It is the yes/no question particle, and it belongs to formal and written Hebrew — in speech you just raise your intonation.

One more thing: with no niqqud, homographs collide. שם is there here, but it is also name; עוד is more and still; פעם is once and time. Learn the vowels alongside this deck (OU2017 — Hebrew Alphabet & Vowel Points), and add the nouns with the Hebrew food and market deck, which is the exact complement to a deck made only of glue.

Deck CJ1979 is in the Flip It library at flip-it.app.