Reading recommendations
Reading books is Hebrew is not easy...
It's almost like a new language to learn
As a teacher I am constantly looking for things that you, as students, can read and understand without the need to use the dictionary in every second word.
It might take a while for me to fill this section up, so keep coming back to update 🙂
Some important notes:
1. Don’t choose books for children in Hebrew. It might look short, but the language is not easy at all, and most importantly – it will be boring for you and not mentally challenging.
2. I do recommend to choose books for “young adults” – as the stories are a lot of times interesting, and the language is good – not too easy, not too hard.
3. Make sure that the translation (if it is translated) is relatively new. Otherwise, it may look like a totally different languge than the modern Hebrew.
Around the World in Eighty Days (in simplified Hebrew)
This book was created just for you, and recommended for Bet levels and above.
It was not originally written in Hebrew, that’s true, but was edited by an experienced Hebrew teacher (and a friend of mine) that made everything possible to keep the rythem of the original book, but adding notes that can help you understand it all and enjoy the reading. I recommend to begin with this book in order to start using the “reading muscle” of Hebrew.
You can click on the picture of the book to go to the original website and explore a bit more about it 🙂
'Redhead' Aya
and the entire family
As a kid, I read this book several times, falling in love with the funny characters. It is a book meant for adolescents but even today I still like it.
The Hebrew in this book is not very easy, but it is devided into very short stories (1-3 pages each), from two different perspectives:
Aya is the older sister, and she is ‘poetic’ and dramatic – which makes her Hebrew a bit hard to understand. But her younger mischievous brother, Nelly (Imanuel) is telling easier stories, and funnier to my opinion.
You will need to use a doctionary at the beginning, but when you read several stories you see that many words repeat again and again.
You can click on the book to download one short story about “the prehistoric man”.
Charlie and the chocolate factory
A classic book, written by Roald Dahl, in a new translation from 2014, that fits young Israeli adults and, in my opinion, also Hebrew learners at advanced levels. The story is well known, and the book is accompanied by a lot of drawings, so it makes the whole reading experience easier.
And the best thing is, of course, the story itself. I could never get enough of Mr. Wonka and his chocolate shenanigans.