Before diving into the Hebrew language, I thought it would be fun to learn some interesting facts about the language itself. However, because Hebrew is essentially completely new to me and I do not know much of
anything about the language or the Israeli culture in general, every fact and
piece of information I found about the Hebrew language was interesting to me :) .
One of the hardest things that I have to get used to about reading Hebrew is that it is read from right to left. The language itself is often used without vowels and verbs have both a masculine and feminine form; a
set-up completely different than that of the English language. Hebrew is one of
the oldest languages in the world and is often referred to as “the language of
the Bible” because originally, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew.
In addition, roughly 7.1 million people worldwide speak Hebrew and six million of them live in Israel. While Ancient Hebrew is the language of the Bible, Modern Hebrew, which developed in the 19th
century, is the language most commonly spoken today. Surprisingly, Hebrew is
spoken in regions and countries such as the West Bank, the Gaza strip and also
the United States. As a matter of fact, there are approximately 200,000 native
Hebrew speakers in the United States alone, in addition to 2.5 million
non-native speakers.
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