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Modern Hebrew: Good speaking dictionary? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5004 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 1 of 14 12 September 2014 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm having trouble figuring out how to pronounce words in written Modern Hebrew. When I've studied languages
in the past that I couldn't sound out from the written form (Mandarin, Cantonese) the Internet has been swarming with tools that would give me the sound of each word in either phonetic transcription or sound. Now I know there are texts with niqqud, but I don't want to rely on them too much. Is there a good dictionary where you can input a Hebrew word and it'll speak the pronunciation or give you the niqqud? Ideally, it would be able to deal with inflections, not just pronounce the base form, because I'm not very good at figuring out the grammatical vowel changes. I'd also like Hebrew-English definitions (or I guess Hebrew-X where X is a major European language would also be OK). Does such a tool exist? Can someone recommend me the best options? Edited by robarb on 12 September 2014 at 8:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4652 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 14 19 September 2014 at 12:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been looking for this tool for ages - I have the same problem when speaking Hebrew.
I have yet to find exactly this. Niqqud will not do in my opinion. The grammatical vowel changes in the past tense are very regular. The problem lies in the future tense. (Present tense functions like adjectives do). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5544 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 3 of 14 19 September 2014 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you are unsure, how to niqqud-ize a verb form, you can use 501 Hebrew Verbs written by Shmuel Bolozky. There you find every imaginable pattern of the elementary verb forms.
(Well, it is printed, but you may look at this verbix maschine, which I use to conjugate Finnish verbs, for Hebrew.) Edited by Cabaire on 19 September 2014 at 1:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4027 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 4 of 14 25 September 2014 at 10:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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From Assimil:
1. Er hat kommen wollen, aber er hat nicht gekonnt. Translated: He wanted to come, but he couldn't. I dont get this. Why is it "wollen" in the first part and "gekonnt" in the second? Is it because there are two verbs in the first part "kommen wollen"? I would have written this as: 2. Er wollte kommen, aber er konnte nicht. Is the meaning of the second way different from the first? Also is the following correct: 3. Er hat gewollt, aber er hat nicht gekonnt. EDIT: I dunno whats going on, I make a new thread and it gets posted into this thread????? I've tried twice. Edited by Gemuse on 25 September 2014 at 10:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5004 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 5 of 14 25 September 2014 at 11:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
At my stage, I'm still trying to learn the regular vowel patterns. Obviously, I can't do this by reading texts that don't have vowels marked. I do grammar drills but I need the input to supplement what I learn in the grammar book, and my level is too low to get it by listening. I need intensive reading.
This is useful, but doesn't solve the problem. If I want to use a particular verb form, I can look it up in a conjugator, but when reading a text I'm not always sure what tense it's in or what verb it is or if it's even a verb at all. Also, I want to learn the vowels for words other than verbs, too. When I see, for example כרום [krom] "chromium," I can never tell whether it's the cognate [krom] or some unknown word *karum or *karom. Basically, it has to be a dictionary that gives you the pronunciation(s) of the form you look up. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5544 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 6 of 14 26 September 2014 at 12:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, you can tell it is the cognate כְּרוֹם (krom), if the sentence makes sense. If it does not and the mention of a metal is utter nonsense, it means probaby כְּרוּם (krum), a fabulous, multicoloured bird. If that is rubbish, too, maybe it is the adjective כָּרֹם (karom), written plene, and means saffron yellow. If that is strange too, try the qal passiv participle of the verb כרם (to pile up), which would be כָּרוּם (karum), piled up. If that does not make it better, maybe there is another word still (I would try something with vineyards, root כרם, who knows, if one can dig a derivation up ;-)?), or it is a proper noun or a name. You see the scope of the problem!
Reading Hebrew is a bit of detective work. You have to make educated guessed what a combination of letters could mean. Is there a preposition or an article in it? A suffix? A construct? A prefix? A nominal derivation? A binjan form... If you find a form of a word, which makes sense in the context, be happy and read on. If not, make a second guess and seek again. Without a solid foundation how to derive word forms and how to reduce them to their lemma form in order to find them in a dictionary, a text can be really insurmountable, that's true. But if you know the rules, you can find every word. Sometimes I have to try four, five possibilities to find a word. Sometimes the difference between the plene form and the defective dictionary form can be the problem. One has to be patient and a bit inventive. Checking the whole sentence sometimes helps too, if you are unsure whether it is a verb or a noun or a adjective. Good luck! Edited by Cabaire on 26 September 2014 at 12:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5004 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 7 of 14 26 September 2014 at 7:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Cabaire, that's exactly the kind of expertise I want to gain, but don't yet have.
It hasn't been practical for me so far to go hunting on the Internet for all the possible meanings and pronunciations of a Hebrew word-form. Verb conjugators only work for verb forms, and traditional dictionaries only work for lemmas. If the word is unfamiliar, sleuthing this out can take more than a minute-- not practical for reading. I've been reduced to pasting things into Google Translate, because it can handle inflections of all types, and also sort of gives you niqqud for lemmas, but not that reliably. The translations are not great as definitions, though. I'd be surprised if there isn't something better out there, a dictionary that lets you search a surface form and outputs all the possible things it could be, their meanings, and pronunciations. I can then use my human intelligence to figure out which one makes sense in the context-- I'm not asking for an automatic Hebrew parser, which is a hard problem for AI. I'm hoping for something comparable to any of a plethora of Chinese dictionaries that take Chinese characters and output all the possible Mandarin readings (most characters have only one, but some have two or three) and their meanings. Or William Whitaker's Words, http://archives.nd.edu/words.html ,which takes a surface form in Latin and gives you the lemma and the tense/case/number/person of the form you entered. If it doesn't exist, alas, I can continue using Google Translate, but this is honestly the worst dictionary situation in which i've been mired while learning any language up to now. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6094 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 8 of 14 01 October 2014 at 12:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Try www.doitinhebrew.com. It is actually quite good at giving the best possibilities for the unvoweled form. It also allows a form of English phonetic input, which is useful when you don't know the layout of a Hebrew keyboard. Ignore the reverso option, which is usually rubbish.
If you have iphone or ipad, the cheap Dictbox app is also good. It accesses a variety of sources, including monolingual encyclopaedias, and usually goes through every possible binyan of a verb if you need it. Don't discount Google. It frequently produces gibberish but can give useful hints as to the meaning required for the given context. I made huge progress in reading Israeli newspapers by having ynet, doitinhebrew and Google open simultaneously. I got a rough translation from Google and used the dictionary site to confirm pronunciation of words I didn't know. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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