Learning Hebrew, My Way

Well, I'm rather a good linguist (and my friends will tell you how slow I am at learning languages), but it seems like a tough game than other few.


The moment I moved out of the airport lobby and looked up to find a sign saying “Dude, your card will work here and yell out notes for you (ATM actually)”, I knew I have to boost my Hebrew skills to survive. But I didn't know which words were the most important to learn, and in what order. I started memorizing words randomly and quite arbitrarily, picked up from traffic billboards, conversations, and the like, and often would never hear the words in usage again. This felt frustrating and futile. It is often said (and makes perfect sense) that the most beneficial words to study are those that are used the most often in speech. This led me to a quandary, because I couldn't find any ready resource with a list of the most common spoken words in modern Hebrew.

Spanish, somehow came easier than this. Maybe it could be because of Ricky Martin, who taught the world, un dos tres… or to Zoya Akhtar for her “Senorita Song”. I was comfortable with it well within a week and surprisingly was also to direct few lost walker, yes of course supported by the hand action, in a month or so. But Hebrew was somehow was not unwinding. One possible reason I could infer was extensive use of epiglottis, which comes so unnatural for an Indian. I remember a desi once saying “Hebrew sounds like you're coughing up your chest infection”. :)

I was discussing this with a friend over lunch one day and we came upon an idea: text subtitles in movies are nearly 100% dialogue, so movie subtitle files are perfect candidates for looking at frequency of spoken word usage. So that's what I went ahead and did. I download a subtitle support file for a Bollywood flicks and brought out a pen and paper. Play Pause game lasted for round two and half hours, and I had the results of this small experiment in my hand.

Aside from being extremely useful for my own, I found the results to be rather fascinating. To see why, take a look at the final sheet of the experiment.

The amazing thing is that with only these 30 odd words, I had covered 25% of total word usages in the movies!

That's 30 words. How much comprehension will I have if I dutifully study and learn, say, 1,000 words? Might be around 60%.

It looks pretty good up until around 100 words, at which point you're already drowning in an abyss of seemingly futile vocabulary. I know, this is somewhat misleading, since multiple forms of the same verb will come up separately on this list, and there's also much more to learn in a language than just vocabulary. Despite usage frequencies, not all words are equal. But if you're visiting Israel, you'll probably be most interested in knowing how to say 'bathroom' (sheh-roo-teem) and 'food' (okhel), among many others. But even so, if you want to put in minimal effort to get maximal lingual return.

I’m not sure if I will remember then all to use them next time, but for sure I would surely use some of them more than often now.

Enjoy!