Hebrew writing

It takes a little while to get used to picking up books and opening them from the "back" so you don't look silly always opening books at the end instead of the beginning.

The only time I've seen vowels written has been in books for little children and in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. Everything else, including all books and newspapers and signs only have the consonants written.


I had never really thought about it with English, but of course as well as printed letters, we have cursive letters, and not only that, we also have many fonts such as serif and sans serif fonts and fancy display fonts. Well, Hebrew has the same. So although I have done most of my learning with the normal printed letters, and even though I spent some time also practising reading cursive letters, I struggle with even recognizing the letters in many logos and decorative signs, even on groceries. On the plane, I was studying the label on the butter (all Kosher), and stared for ages at one letter in the word -- not able to figure it out. Finally I had to ask the hostess what this particular letter was because I had never seen it written in a font like that!

But it was nice when I joined a Sabbath evening service with a Messianic congregation to be able to understand many of the songs on the overhead (without vowels). Of course, I have learnt words like God and righteous and truth and sing, so in that context of Christian songs I was able to figure out much of the meaning even though I couldn't quite read the script fast enough to sing until about the third time through each chorus.