The Hebrew alphabet, letter by letter

Right to left — and the numbers still go left to right

Hebrew is read and written from right to left. A page of Hebrew begins where an English page ends, and a Hebrew book opens from what an English reader would call the back.

Numbers and any Latin letters inside a Hebrew sentence still run left to right, so a sentence containing a phone number changes direction twice. This sorts itself out faster than you would think. It is the kind of thing that feels impossible on the first day and is invisible by the second month.

All twenty-two letters

Here is the alphabet in order, with the sound each letter makes in Modern Israeli Hebrew and the form it takes at the end of a word where that differs.

The five letters that change at the end of a word

Kaf, Mem, Nun, Pe and Tsadi each have a second shape used only as the last letter of a word: ך ם ן ף ץ. Same letter, same sound — only the shape changes, the way a printed a and a handwritten a are still one letter.

The usual way to remember which five is כמנפ״ץ, which is not a word at all. It is just the five of them strung together in order so they can be said in one breath.

Where are the vowels?

Hebrew writes consonants. The vowels exist as a system of dots and dashes under and around the letters, called nikud, but everyday Hebrew leaves them out. Newspapers, novels, street signs, text messages and the label on a carton of milk are all unpointed.

You meet nikud in children's books, in poetry, in dictionaries and in prayer books — anywhere the reader cannot be assumed to know the word already. That is precisely what it is for. A reader who knows the language supplies the vowels from memory, the way an English reader knows that read in this sentence rhymes with red.

For a beginner it means learning to read twice: first with the vowel marks, which is genuinely easy, and later without them, which takes vocabulary rather than technique. The second stage is not a harder kind of reading. It is the same reading with more words behind it.

Print, handwriting, and why the two look nothing alike

The letters in the table above are the print forms — what you see in books and on screens. Israelis do not handwrite them. Everyday handwriting uses a separate cursive alphabet, where מ looks like a rounded n and א looks like a lowercase k, and it has to be learned as its own set of shapes.

Whether you need it depends on what you want. To read and to type, print alone is enough. To read a note from a friend, or to fill in a form at an office in Israel, cursive is not optional.

The pairs that catch everyone out

Almost every mistake a beginner makes reading Hebrew is one of about six confusions. They are worth meeting deliberately rather than discovering one at a time.

• ב and כ — one has a square corner at the bottom right, the other is round.
• ד and ר — the corner again. ד has one at the top right, ר does not.
• ה and ח — ח is closed along the top, ה has a gap in its left leg.
• ו, ז and ן — a plain stroke, a stroke with a hat, and a stroke that drops below the line.
• ם and ס — the square one is final Mem, the round one is Samekh.
• ט and ת both sound like t, ק and כ with a dot both sound like k, and ח and כ without a dot are both the throaty ch. Which letter a word takes is spelling, not sound, and it is learned one word at a time.

So how long until you can read?

Sounding out pointed Hebrew — reading a word you have never seen before, slowly — takes most adults between three and six one-hour lessons, with a little practice in between. It is a real milestone and it arrives quickly.

Reading unpointed Hebrew at ordinary speed is a different matter, because it depends on knowing the words rather than the letters. That comes gradually across the first year or two, and it comes without your noticing the day it happened.

The letters, in other words, are the cheap part. They are worth learning properly and early, because everything after them is easier once the page stops looking like decoration.

Questions people ask

• How many letters are in the Hebrew alphabet?

  Twenty-two. Five of them have a second form used only at the end of a word, so you will sometimes see the alphabet counted as twenty-seven shapes — but there are twenty-two letters.

• Does Hebrew have capital letters?

  No. Hebrew has no upper and lower case, so a name at the start of a sentence looks exactly like the same name in the middle of one.

• Do I have to learn the alphabet before I can start speaking Hebrew?

  No, and many people speak first. But the alphabet is only a few lessons' work, and once you can read it every written thing becomes usable — so most learners are glad they did it early.

• Is the Hebrew alphabet the same as the Arabic one?

  No. Both descend from the same ancient Phoenician alphabet, and both run right to left and leave the vowels out of ordinary text, but the shapes are different and knowing one does not let you read the other.

• Can I learn the Hebrew alphabet on my own?

  The shapes and the sounds, yes. What is harder alone is the pronunciation of ח and ר, and the habit of reading unpointed text — both of which go faster with someone correcting you as you go.