Please listen to this 2 min course overview, and/or read the transcript below.

Saper Li Sipur ספר לי סיפור is Hebrew for “tell me a story,” and this course uses stories to teach Hebrew in an engaging and natural way. But why learn Hebrew through stories? There are several really great reasons. For one, stories are entertaining. They keep our interest, and they give us a reason to pay attention and try to understand what’s going on. Stories also provide context for learning the language. Think about all the vocabulary words that you’ve written down and added to your notes, all the words that you’ve picked up from various apps and videos - you probably didn’t retain very much of it, did you? Memorizing lists of words might seem like a good language learning strategy, but without context, much of those words never make it to your long term memory. 

The context that stories provide doesn’t just help you acquire vocabulary, but it also helps you learn grammar and verb conjugations in a natural way. No more sitting with a verb table studying one tense at a time; you’re hearing and understanding verbs being used naturally in the context of a story, the way that you naturally use different verbs in different tenses in your native language. 

So how does the Learn Hebrew Through Stories Curriculum work? Each unit is built around a short story that’s presented in a video format. Both pictures and English translations are used to help make the story comprehensible - after all, you can only learn Hebrew from the story if you understand it. That’s how we acquire language - by understanding what we read and what we hear. Each story includes several activities to develop both your Hebrew listening and Hebrew reading comprehension skills, and to help you acquire the vocabulary so that you can apply it in different contexts, like speaking and writing. 

You’ll get a new story every two weeks, and while they will usually be separate, unrelated tales, each one builds off of the vocabulary of previous stories, so they’re presented to you in a specific order. A suggested schedule is provided to help you as you move through this course. It’s better to do a little bit every day than to try and cram all the activities in a day or two - trust me, your future Hebrew speaking self will thank you.