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- "האמא באה."
182 Comments
No, this is just one of the several patterns. I imagine we'll dive into that soon enough, verb conjugation is fundamental to the language.
Not speaking to girls, speaking about girls. For instance, you would never say "אבא בא" (aba bah) even if you were talking to a woman because אבא is masculine. In the same way, you'd never say "אמא בא" (ima ba) because אמא is feminine. Use בא (ba) when the subject is masc. and באה (bah) when the subject is feminine.
Correct me if I'm wrong. [2019/03/25]
Robbadob, I appreciate your trying to help, but your comment has a few errors, so in order not to confuse learners, I will rephrase what you said and correct the errors.
Not speaking to girls, speaking about girls. For instance, you would never say
אבא באה
(aba ba’a) even if you were talking to a woman because ba’a is feminine. In the same way, you would never say אמא בא because is בא masculine.
Use בא ba when the subject is masculine and באה ba’a when the subject is feminine.
Robbadob, your 1st sentence is exactly right. After that, you erred with
you would never say "אבא בא"
You absolutely would say "אבא בא"; both words are masculine.
Your transliterations of both "בא" and "באה" as (bah) are inconsistent, making no distinction in pronunciation.
Our sentence here is feminine, "האמא באה"; with nikud (vowel symbols) it's "הָאִמָּא בָּאָה", and it's pronunciation can be shown, for example, as "ha-íma ba-á" (also "ha-íma ba-áh" to show the silent "h" representing the silent "ה" at the end).
The masculine version is "האבא בא"; with nikud "הָאַבָּא בָּא", pronounced "ha-ába ba".
2020-08-16 rich739183 edited
Hebrew may use the אהו"י letters as vowels, but sometimes there is no אהו"י letter but there is a sound like i, a, e, o, or u. For instance: the word סדרה (series) is prononced "sidra" - NOT "SDRA". The word ספר (book) is pronounced "sefer" - NOT "SFR". And the word אמא is pronounced "ima". Hebrew is an abjad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad
but how do you know which vowel sound it is going to make? like how do I know if it's going to make an a,i,e, or o sound?
Unfortunately, you have to guess (or memorize...). If you're not sure about what you hear (is it "ha'eema ba'a? ha'ama ba? [the first one is correct]), you can always ask me.
In some cases the context will inform you of the vowel sounds. One root can have multiple meanings and can form several words just by changing the vowel sounds.
With Nikud, you would accent the letter has, but today nobody uses it so it just means people memorize it
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Unfortunately you only know from the context. Take ספר. Say-fer is a book. See-pare means he told. Sa - far means he counted. Seh-fehr means the book of. There may even be more combinations. I'm pretty fluent and my mind is always going through these combinations as I read. As you might guess, I read very slowly.
Did you notice some tiny dots and lines under the letters? They are like the a e i o u Hebrew has the א ה ו י And the Nikud, the tiny sings.
you learn the vowel symbols and you learn the words with the symbols, "hebrew with nikkudot".
found in prayer and childrens books.
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Well hebrew is atough language lets say like english you know ( now read the word know and tell me why you dont pronounce it
The aleph letter does not have a definite vowel sound. none of them do
This is actually the first time I've studied a language that has different conjugations in the third person singular for both masculine and feminine.
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Same here... Racking my brains trying to think of another one. I guess Arabic does the same...
There is no such thing as the imperfective tense. There are perfective and imperfective aspects. But in Russian, gender differences only exist in the past tense of verbs, regardless of whether they are perfective or imperfective, whereas in Hebrew they exist in all tenses - the past, the present and the future.
Thanks for the clarification. But it is worth noting that the phenomenon is not restrictedto Semitic languages.
The reason for Hebrew and Russian is the same, though -- the forms were originally participles, which (like many adjectives) have separate masculine and feminine forms.
For this early part of the course, yes, the definite article ("the") is the letter ה with an "ah" vowel, as a prefix to a noun or adjective.
But an exception occurs with any of three common prepositions that are also one-letter prefixes: ב (usually translated as "in" or "with"), ל (to or for), and כ (like or as). With an indefinite noun, those prefixes typically have the short "eh" vowel, as in "to a man" (לגבר) pronounced "legever". With a definite noun, as in "to the man", the word remains לגבר, but is pronounced "lagever": the preposition absorbs the definite article so that the letter ה disappears and its vowel moves to the preposition (le+ha becomes la ("to the").
As orka10 pointed out, an initial letter ה is not always the definite article. When a word itself begins with the letter ה, that letter ה is not the definite article. To make that word definite, another letter ה as a prefix to it will be the definite article.
E.g., הורים = parents, and ההורים = the parents.
2019-08-24 rich739183
Not always, it depends, for example the words הרבה or הגיה the ה is based in the word, but the is always first letter ה
Am I the only one who hears an "i" sound there somewhere? Where does that come from?
Hebrew may use the אהו"י letters as vowels, but sometimes there is no אהו"י letter but there is a sound like i, a, e, o, or u. For instance: the word סדרה (series) is prononced "sidra" - NOT "SDRA". The word ספר (book) is pronounced "sefer" - NOT "SFR". And the word אמא is pronounced "ima". Hebrew is an abjad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad
Modern Hebrew is not a pure abjad, because vowel signs (nikud "נִקּוּד" or "ניקוד") are built into the language. Printed materials, including this course, generally use nikud only when necessary to avoid misunderstanding (and not always even then). A good dictionary will display a word with nikud, which helps with pronunciation and to distinguish between words that have the same consonants but different vowels; because of such heteronyms, though, you still need to understand the context well enough to decide which word to use.
Morfix (morfix.co.il/en/ and mobile apps) is a popular online He-En/En-He dictionary. Although it has more features for Hebrew speakers learning English than the reverse, it is more authoritative than publicly crowd-sourced machine translators such as those from Google, Bing, et alia.
Here are 2 websites that give nikud for a word or phrase; just be aware that some spellings can have multiple valid vowelizations and you may need to choose an alternative to the first one given:
https://nakdan.dicta.org.il
http://www.nakdan.com/Nakdan.aspx
2019-11-20 rich739183
Yes, the aleph letter is always a glottal stop although I do not think the stop is always pronounced
In English "the mom" is hardly ever used - most often it's "my mom", "your mom" or simply Mom. When it it appropriate to say "HA IMA" in Hebrew?
In the case of the example used they are refering to a specific mom "the mom". Or maybe they want to know which parent; " the mom is coming" as opposed to "the dad is coming"
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So that we can learn how to use articles. I find it useful, even if this particular phrase isn't a common one.
However, it's certainly possible. I've said "the mom" or "the dad" before (in English), usually when referring to someone else's family, especially if I don't know them well.
E.G.: "There were kids were running all over the place. The mom was trying to round them up. I don't know where the dad was."
Or, in showbiz: The mom is played by Angelina Jolie.
A lot of sentences and phrases can sound odd in isolation like this, but make sense in context. You just have to be creative to think of a context, or simply accept that the phrases are to teach language concepts, even if the specific phrase might seem strange on its own.
Yes, but there are errors in the Japanese beta, so I always wonder if I can trust this one?
It is worng to use 'the mom' or 'the dad' in hebrew. Nobody says so. Neither in english.
Iris, there are other comments on this page that provide various perfectly good examples of using "the mom" in English.
2020-12-24 rich739183
Hoo boy. What have I gotten myself into. The way you have to figure out the vowels on your own is giving me a massive headache. Glad I'm not the only one reading Ima as Ama, though...
Same for me when i learnt english. For example COLOR is prenonced KALER. Go figure :)
Is an expert available to say how the phrase "the British are coming" would be expressed in Hebrew? Would it be a direct translation, or a different idiom? That phrase in English treats "the British" as plural (implying people/soldiers/forces or "army and navy", perhaps).
2020-12-24 rich739183
Can somebody explain Why do we have to say "ima" when there is א ?why and when does the sound of the letter change? That's the most difficult part for me ;(
If you think that א stands for any particular vowel, you are mistaken. Historically, it stands for the glottal stop, the sound pronounced in place of 't' after short vowels by some young native speakers of English (e.g. "ge' we'" instead of "get wet" or "bu'n" instead of "button"). Although it's true that most of the time it is followed by 'uh' vowel, it can be followed by any Hebrew vowel. In the case of אמא , it is 'ee' (/ee-muh/).
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Sorry :-) א is even pronounced sometimes as o... like את מי תאהב יותר (et mi TOHAV yoter) who will you love more.
In your example of תאהב, the sound between the letters ת and ה is best described as the sound of the cholam vowel, not the aleph consonant. Similarly, the initial sound of the word אֶת in your sentence is that of the segol vowel, not that of the aleph consonant.
The distinction that Dmitry_Arch made between the sound of the aleph and the sound of a vowel with it is especially important for new learners such as Love-yeshua737, who recognized that "That's the most difficult part".
2019-08-24 rich739183
The aleph letter does not have a definite vowel sound: it depends on the niqqud (vowel dots), which are not put on duolingo
Why there are no lessons to drill Hebrew letters? There go words right away... I can't read it...
This course provides an introduction to the letters and vowel symbols in the Tips and Notes document, at
https://duome.eu/tips/en/he
It lists the letters in alphabetic order, which you need to know for looking up words in a printed dictionary.
2020-08-16 rich739183
How do I differentiate between "Is the mother coming?" and "The mother is coming"? They both seem to be האמא באה
In formal speech and writing, you would formally put a האם before a yes/no question. In every day speech and writing, "האמא באה" (the mother is coming) differs from "האמא באה?" (is the mother coming?) by the question mark and the intonation. In short: 1. האם is formal 2. intonation 3. ?
yes, in Hebrew, there are no tenses-only past, present, future. he is coming and he comes are the same.
I followed the guidance of one of the students using https://www.branah.com/hebrew. It works, but it's a lot of work, it takes a lot of time. I still think that the ideal thing would be to provide an on-screen keyboard. In addition, I imagine that learning Hebrew should approach a somewhat meaningless theme for common purposes. I think that instead of learning that "The Father is coming", it would be better to start with: 'good morning', 'yes', 'no', 'Thank you', 'please', everyday thing.
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This is exactly how children are taught first reading at school. Short words with little amount of characters... cause its difficult enough :)
Why does Duolingo ask you to type in hebrew if they don't provide a tool for it?, that's not fair, they should include the letters so we can type them, and also all the exercises should include pronunciation sound since there's no way to know how to pronounce a word by simply reading it.
How do you know if it is, The mom is coming. or, Is the mom coming? If there is no word for is.
Soooooo,.......where does it teach the actual beginners things like...is and the alphabet??? Cause i may have missed it ...
@Christopher Mack (YoungChevy), here are the course notes:
https://duome.eu/tips/en/he
2020-01-04 rich739183
I wrote: האבא אה and it said it was right even though it should be the mum is coming : האמא באה
Why should we use article "the" for mom and dad? It is used a lot here in sentences but It feels weird.
mariana (Marimart777), yes, Hebrew is a difficult language and Duolingo leaves much to be desired, but then it's free, so maybe worth it. Looks like you are studying Japanese and English. Are you here just to see what the Hebrew course looks like?
2020-09-15 rich739183
yes, Duolingo is a really cool platform for learning new languages, I'm trying to learn Hebrew and Japanese and it's going good, (my main languages are Spanish and English, so I just wanted to try English Duolingo) so no, I'm actually learning Hebrew.
Excellent! If you are using the Android app, please also use the website for the added features there. E.g., lessons on the website offer "tips" (course notes) for each skill, which are very helpful, but not offered in the app.
Enjoy!
2020-09-15 rich739183
RonaShacha in a comment above mentioned that this is exactly how children are first taught in school, so I guess it has been found to be most effective. Here is a site to learn the Hebrew letters which I found very helpful. https://www.cartoonhebrew.com/
Why is there no audio or any other clue how to pronounce it in Hebrew?
Florian, if you scroll through the comments, you’ll see that I gave the transliteration: Ha-ima ba’a.
Florian, the audio button works for me on this page on the website. If it is missing or not working on one of the mobile apps, I hope you reported that with the flag button. If it is missing or not working for you on the website, I wonder if reloading the page or using a different browser would help.
2020-11-23 rich739183
There is no audio for the hebrew. Is that correct? How can I learn the language without hearing it??
Ray, there is no blue audio button for you to press? Then the best thing to do is to go to a site called Pealim and it will give you the pronunciation in Latin letters. Or you could scroll through the comments and see that someone has usually posted a transliteration to help you with pronunciation.
That might seem like a cumbersome thing to do, but Duolingo is what it is and it’s free! Scrolling through the comments also helps you pick up useful tips here and there. In the beginning there are a lot of comments for each sentence, but they taper off to reasonable amount later on.
Ha-ima ba-a?
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With a virtual key board such as this, http://gate2home.com/Hebrew-Keyboard, you can type, copy and paste. You can also use the virtual keyboard utility of your operating system and change the input language to hebrew.
I added the Hebrew keyboard to my computer, so to answer questions I now switch between the Hebrew and English keyboards. You have to guess where the Hebrew letters are, so it is a little tedious, but it does work. :)
Here is a keyboard layout you (KrystaDawn) can place in a small window on one side of your screen to see where the keys are instead of having to guess. https://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/goglobal/keyboards/kbdheb.html
Here is more information about keyboards for both of you: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/16251269
I don't understand duolingo Hebrew...where do I get an alphabet to copy and paste Hebrew letters??
No; it's the ה that is in front of the אמא that means "the". אמא by itself is "mom", add the ה and it becomes האמא "the mom".
is there any way to type the vowel points? I'm having hard time w/o training wheels.
Here is Duolingo's instruction:
"Very important! Never use nikkud when writing answers in Hebrew...."
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/16251269
2019-08-24 rich739183
The English part of this Hebrew course contains lots of nonsense. For example, I've seen "at the back" where it should be "in the back", "are going there every day" etc. Unfortunately, I cannot report those things since I use the mobile application most of the time and it doesn't offer that option.
"at the back" is completely fine where I'm from, and "in the back" sounds odd to me. (Unless it's a separate room at the back, rather than just the back of a single big room.)
Why two different characters in the word mom? The first m drawn differently from the second m.
It would have been better if we begin to learn the alphabet before the vocabulary.
For the translation, can I also say "The mom is coming."? or does it have to be "The mom comes."? Is there a difference between the two?
Jesus loves you all!! He is coming soon!! Trust in him ! He can save your soul!! Jesus is coming soon for his people, he is the only one who can save you too!!
No native English speaker says "The mom is coming". Not ever. Why is this the correct translation?
I wonder why would I go here If I know God is a teacher. free will, I don't even know what to do with this language if I don't have love. ~Vent
Wouldn't you say "The mother" in this case? To my knowledge (and English is not my mother tongue), the word "mom" is used to refer to either your own mother or your friends' mother. People always use a possessive adjective in front of the word "mom" unless they refer to their own mother while speaking to their sibling or some other close relative, in which case the word Mom is capitalized. I've never heard of "the mom".
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Nothing weird about it. E.g. "Who's the mom/dad?"; "She's the mom."; He's the dad."; etc. - all are common in English [especially, but not limited to, when talking to children (e.g. "the mommy bear")].
Can you think of a situation where someone would say, "The mom is coming" rather than "My/Your/His/Her/Their mom is coming"? It seems improbable to me. So I think האמא is definitely "the mother".
"Mom" is just an informal word for mother, they can be used interchangeably. "אמא" is a cognate with "mom". They literally mean the same thing. "Out of all the people in that family, the mom/mother was the smelliest" You COULD say "their mom" but really the mom is included in the group, and she isn't her own mother.
I admit that I might be wrong about the use of "the mom", but, when used without an article or possessive adjective, the words Mom and Dad are capitalized. This rule is explained in numerous sources. See, for example, thrilledbythethought.com for When to Capitalize Mom and Dad?
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אמא is mother. We dont really have a nick name for mother. One could say imoosh but its really very childish
I think that the main reason for DL translating אמא as mom rather than mother is that DL emphasizes informal speech. Since אמא is how Israelis address their mother, and mom is a very (the most?) common way for USA English speakers to address their mother, DL translates אמא to mom.
DL may also be considering the distinction between אמא as both mom and mother (familiar), versus אם as not only mother the parent (formal, and not mom, as in Mother's Day יום האם) but also the figurative mother as in mother tongue שפת אם.
2019-08-24 rich739183
Dmitry_Arch, in your reply to EdwardDov's example about a bear, you might be unaware that there is a very popular children's story (Goldilocks and the Three Bears) about a papa bear, a mama bear, and a baby bear; hence his use of a nickname rather than "mother".
While "the mom" is not the most common usage, it's still appropriate as shown in various comments on this page. In those situations, the choice of "the mother" or "the mom" is one of style (level of formality).
2020-12-24 rich739183
There is no rule about which mothers can be called "mom."
Look at that mom over there. Moms in this town drive fast.
I have never encountered a rule about capitalizing mom. It is not a proper noun.
Of course there's a capitalization rule!
When used as a form of address, "Mom" is a proper noun, and capitalized as such. Saying "Hi Mom", or "I'm busy Son, ask Mom", uses "Mom" (and "Son", in the second example) as a proper noun. It's no different than any nickname: "buzz" is a sound; "Buzz" is the name by which Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr is known; maybe you've heard of him.
2019-11-20 rich739183
