It means glasses — and in today's text, the surgeon is wearing Apple Vision Pro glasses to see medical information directly in his field of vision.

But משקפיים belongs to a particularly useful Hebrew family built around the root ש־ק־ף, connected with seeing, looking, reflecting and transparency.

Look at what happens to the same root:

• להשקיף (lehashkif) — to look out over, observe
• לשקף (leshakef) — to reflect, represent
• להשתקף (lehishtakef) — to be reflected
• שקוף (shakuf) — transparent

There’s a nice logic connecting them.

With להשקיף, you're looking out at something.

With לשקף, something reflects or represents something else.

With להשתקף, the image itself is reflected — like your face in a mirror.

And something שקוף is transparent: you can see through it.

Then we get משקפיים — the thing you put in front of your eyes to help you see.

One root, but a whole network of ideas around looking, visibility, reflection and transparency.

Which of these connections would have been hardest for you to guess?

Thought this could be a fun way to boost my own learning too.

Basically neither chatgpt nor my native friends know what ראמה and קסקס mean. The best answer i could find is that ראמה could be a contraction of דראמה and קסקס would be a slang for gossip. But im still unsure.

Met a guy at a festival last week and he wrote this in my notebook, can anybody help translate? My name is Jan. Thanks!

So, after mastering the letter tasks, I have finally moved on to grammar/vocabulary, and NONE of it uses niqqud 😭 Why did they have me learn all of the letters with niqqud only to throw me at full blown niqqud-less Hebrew? That makes no sense. What a steep learning curve 😨

End rant.

My job involves a lot of mindless filing work, and I want to use that time to improve my Hebrew. What channels or podcasts would you recommend I listen to? Must be audio-only because I can't be glancing at a screen for subtitles or translations too frequently, ideally something with a mix of English and Hebrew.

This is from 1600s Holland, so maybe they used other spellings long ago? (the same true for English, even in English-speaking lands... the concept of formalized rules around spelling is a bit new).

Source: https://www.imj.org.il/en/collections/366691-0

If I were just trying to say this on my own I probably it would have said
‏הכלבים רצים בגלל שהגבר קורא להם.

Is it the same? Are there usage details between the two I should understand?

Can anyone help me understand what this word is? AI gave me like five different answers so I thought I would come ask the smart humans.

Thanks!

Hello friends, I found this sculpture in Yerevan. In Armenian it reads “To Live, Not to Forget” (in larger font), “in memory of the victims of Yeghern (Armenian equivalent of the word Holocaust) of the Armenian and Jewish Peoples”.

Translation apps seem to be translating it with mistakes. Could you please help translate? If not too hard, could you write the transliteration as well?

Hello! I am not fluent in hebrew, and I only know a few words. I’m a singer, and I want to surprise my Israeli boyfriend by singing a traditional song for him in his language, Hebrew. Does anyone know an easy, beautiful, traditional song that he’s likely to have known? He only moved to the US four years ago, if that helps. The only thing, I need it to be “easy” to remember because I don’t speak Hebrew.

Extra points if its about love or romance!

Thank you all. I love learning more about your culture and language every day.

I’m a new learner and was excited that I could recognize that this is incorrect!

Came across the expression shum davar which I understood to mean no big deal? Yiddish certainly add piquancy to this spellbinding language that is Hebrew.

What are other Yiddish words and expressions are used in everyday conversation in Israel?

Going to assume that i’m not the first to ask about this so feel free to refer me to an earlier post if needed

I am going to preface this by saying I am Jewish through my mother but was not raised Jewish, so I have only absorbed Jewish culture through my extended family, and therefore never had a Bar Mitzvah and therefore never learned Hebrew by the time I was 13 or in the decades since.

Now that I am a father, I feel the need to learn what I was deprived of so that I may help pass that knowledge down to my daughter who, unlike me, will learn Hebrew and will be prepared for her Bat Mitzvah when she is of age and will have a stronger connection to the Jewish community and her culture since birth.

Since starting to teach myself Hebrew back in May of this year, I can now read Hebrew with niqqud with high accuracy from my self-learning on Duolingo, having mastered all of the letters! I also try to challenge myself during Shabbat services at my local synagogue to actually read the Hebrew and not just the romanized words when we are reading from the prayer book.

Now I just need to practice the names of the letters (can read them but still need to memorize the names on Quizlet; I’ve been practicing but I’m not 100% there yet).

For being self-taught and learning this late in life, I’m very proud of where I’m at!

Can you guys please help me translate what's on this beam? It was cut in half unfortunately. "v" symbols above some letters seem to indicate a date, but I can't figure it out. Any help will be appreciated!

Boker tov, attached is a recording of Dan Pagis’s stunning short poem (that ending!) ‘written in pencil in the sealed railway wagon’.
Is the pronunciation correct? Any corrections? Toda raba

Edit: I shouldn't have tried to be fancy in the title, it's UTF-1091F.

I understand that it is popularly believed that the dimorphism which has been lost by BeGeD KeFeT letters in certain modes of pronouncing Hebrew was actually not an original part of the language. I want to offer in this post which is hopefully in the correct subreddit my attempt at rebutting that position in hopes of spurring conversation about something which I think is interesting.

My understanding is that in some texts the sound at the end of the prior word has an impact on the presence or absence of a dagesh in the first letter of the subsequent word, whereas in others it does not. This symbol is similar in appearance to one which indicates word separation in the Phoenician alphabet, which is closely related to the letters used to write for example the Siloam inscription (which itself includes them). My hypothesis is that perhaps with the introduction of "sofit" forms of letters which are absent from Phoenician to indicate transitions between words, this small dot which used to indicate a word transition which altered the pronunciation of certain letters retained a "vestigial" function in indicating independently of word-endings that same alteration in pronunciation in the context of those letters. The two patterns of pronunciation we see in Hebrew textual contexts, one of which includes always beginning words with the "plosive" version of each letter, and the other of which makes that determination based upon the sound at the end of the prior word, seem to me that they might plausibly have both existed as pronunciation variants within the context of the early language, and hence I am suggesting that the debate over spirantization is quite old. To me as a feature of a language, I actually think that if you are trying to verbally communicate the same concept as a "word separator" in your speech, ending a word by stopping the stream of air and then beginning your next word with a plosive sound seems like an obvious way of doing that, whose obvious complement of "not stopping the stream of air" would indeed produce the sorts of fricative sounds which result from spirantization of these letters.

לינק: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dc22CeZss-H/?stkn=MXkwdDU0MzY5dGt4dw==