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Pronouns in Hebrew can be confusing in English!
She is היא(he), he is הוא(hu), who is מי(mi) and me is אני(ani)!
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As a native Arabic speaker, they're kinda easy for me to learn since they're sort of identical to those of Arabic's :)
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Were English pronouns difficult for you to learn? Seems it would be confusing in both directions. :)
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nope...
since we start learning arabic and english in the kindergarten , at least thats in my country ; Syria
a lot of hebrew words are identical to arabic , you can google that... you'll be surprised , in fact , even turkish and arabic have some similar words... sometimes identical
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But how is it so confusing for an English speaker? They are just words you memorize like the rest. Could someone elaborate perhaps? I am a native English speaker.
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I don't know, maybe we should report about it. However, it supposed to be pronounced /hu ba/. By the way, you can use Forvo for learning pronunciation. (:
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Maybe this course is Like Esperanto and Irish, They have a real voice actor instead of a computer-generated sound, ans like in those 2 courses, not all sentences have sound.
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That's exactly it. They have an actual voice actor. (which I honestly am enjoying much more than the sometimes inaccurate TTS used in other courses. c: )
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Since Hebrew nouns have gender, "הוא"/"היא" are used to refer to inanimate objects. For example, we would refer to a "שולחן" (a table) as "הוא" because it's masculine. So sometimes "הוא" and "היא" are translated to "it".
It probably wasn't accepted because it doesn't make much sense in this context - if something is coming, it isn't an "it". It's a person/an animal, and we would use "הוא" or "היא".
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But if an animal were coming, wouldn't you say "It is coming" ? Other than that, thank you for the explanation!
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If "it" is an unknown thing we use זה בא (ze bah). But when an animal or even an object is doing the action we use either male or female
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If you want to emphasize the fact that "the coming thing" is not a human being you could say "זה בא".
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I think it is like Arabic, isn't it? We use هو ( for masculine nouns ) and هى ( for fem. nouns ) are translated to ''it''
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I think abstract nouns could also be used in such sentence, e.g. Change is coming. -> It is coming.
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It for an animal - yes. It for a non-living thing - no. If it is not a living thing, you would say זה בא (ze ba) for "it's coming". ze=it/this/that (masculine).
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Is הוא like in arabic 'huwa" ? ( in arabic it means 'he' and 'is' is implied ?
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Yes. (: And like in Arabic, it's not only for people (Mike-->>הוא), also for masculine objects - because everything in Hebrew is gendered... (שולחן[table, masculine]-->>הוא)
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YES! :) And Arabic "hiya" is the same with "ha yod aleph" in Hebrew too...
P/S: I can't type Hebrew here because everything will be jumbled... :)
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I thought "הוא" was "it". Could it also be used as "he" or "she"?
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The word "הוא" is the third singular masculine pronoun. Since all Hebrew nouns have a gender (either masculine or feminine), you would use this pronoun for masc. words. If you want to stress the fact that the referred noun is not a human being/animate thing you can use the pronoun "זה" ("this").
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In most cases, it's "he". Since Hebrew nouns have a gender, it can also refer to inanimate objects, so it could be "it". I can't think of a scenario in which "הוא" means "she".
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She is היא pronounced (hee).
He is הוא pronounced (hoo).
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Feminine form.
(He) comes = (he) is coming = הוא) בא)
(She) comes = (she) is coming = היא) באה)
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הוא = Hu (u like 'full', not like 'nut'). או = 'O. like in the begining of 'orange.
Why is he spelt like this. @ Israelis why. I know I'm one of you and i just need to step up my game but why.
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"Is"? The hints show it for "הוא", but I thought Hebrew doesn't have "to be"...
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The phrase "הוא בא" means "he is coming" or "he comes". Hebrew only has three tenses - past, present, future. Hebrew does not have "to be", but they couldn't translate "הוא בא" into "he coming"... (: In short, הוא בא is in the present tense, therefore you can translate it into "he's coming"/"he comes" by the context.
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Right, I understand that. What I don't understand is why the dictionary hints show "is" for the "הוא" part (as the first hint, in fact), so I'd come up with "Is is coming" or "Is comes" if I used the hints and didn't realise that this makes no sense.
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I don't know... (: I'll report about it to let them know. But maybe it's like in the Italian course - "ci" and "che" have multiple meanings, and Duo does not always show the correct one as the first one... But, um, it's one of the very first lessons, so I'll report it.. (:
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It sure would help if they added the "float over" voice... sounding these words. I've learned many languages and wanted to learn Hebrew for a long time; but this presentation is kind of difficult... I know it's still beta... I hope they do fix some of these.
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It is not because of the beta, and even not because of Duolingo, I don't know the exact reason, but it seems it doesn't exist a good software to produce voice in Hebrew. I see the courses you've taken, excluding Norwegian (I have not taken that one) all the other courses have a good software for producing an artificial voice. But in Hebrew (and Esperanto and Irish, so far) the courses have a real voice actor to read the sentences, that is why the Hebrew voice does not seem robotic. Even in google translate Hebrew, Esperanto and Irish cannot be pronounced (and from that I may say state that, worlwide, there is no software available for that goal).
And about the "float over" option, I do not know how difficult would it be for Duolingo team to split the audio recorded word by word, Esperanto and Irish also don't have that option.
Have a nice day.
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I can understand why there isn't an automatic voice for Hebrew (anywhere in the world). Because of the lack of vowels, it can't be automated. Programmers would have to program every single word in, and in that case, might as well use a real person instead. (Though it might be possible using nikud . . . I don't know enough to know if that's straightforward or not, but it can't be worse than English!)
However, that reasoning fails miserably for Esperanto. My guess is that, because it's not a natural language, there hasn't been enough demand for it yet.
I don't know enough about Irish to hypothesize why that one's missing.
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Earlier they taught us that האם is is/does masculine so what is the difference between האם and הוא
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My understanding (I'm learning, too), is that האם is how to start a question (generally only used formally). If האם is present, the sentence is always a question.
But הוא means "he." It can translate to "He is" because there is no verb for "to be" in Hebrew (though why they suggest it for this sentence is beyond me. It seems like "He comes" would be a better translation.)
Incidentally, I'm confident about what I said about האם. As for הוא, I got most of that from the discussions here. ;)
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No. In Hebrew there is no way to know how words sounds, except when there is ניקוד. (I dont know the translation). So it's sounds "hu ba"
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Why is there no sound i don't know what the letters mean yet its very hard to memorize them if i don't know what they sound like
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This can help you learn the letters: https://www.memrise.com/course/1087087/hebrew-alef-bet/
It is duolingo's official course for the alphabet. It still doesn't mean you can sound anything out (the lack of vowels in Hebrew makes this difficult/impossible) but it definitely can help remember how to spell the words.
Oh, and this one will teach you the possible sounds each letter can make: https://tinycards.duolingo.com/decks/6ffe8ee7-b859-4451-834e-df28b9ed927e I don't know who made that one, but it has helped me a lot.
And this one will teach you where all the letters are on the keyboard: https://www.memrise.com/course/1636485/typing-hebrew/
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I have found memrise a few days ago its getting better now
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I am best in hebrew. I am from israel. אני הכי טוב בעברית, אני מישראל.
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The audio on this question is broken for me. My browser is Google Chrome Version 63.0.3239.132 (Official Build) (64-bit).
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It was a mnemonic. She is "he". He is "who". Who is "me". And me is "ani"
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Sorry I need to ask... Is "בא/ה" used like "come" in English in the NSFW sense?
