HEBREWfrom zero
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Twenty-two letters, about two weeks of work, and five specific pairs that cause years of spelling mistakes if nobody warns you about them early.
Hebrew has 22 letters. English has 26. This is the part beginners dread most and it is over fastest, usually inside two to three weeks of ordinary practice.
Every letter is a consonant. The vowels are not letters at all, which is the single most important thing to understand before you start, and the thing most alphabet charts never mention.
If you want the wider picture of what comes after this, here is the full timeline for learning Hebrew. The alphabet is week one to three of it.
You have probably seen Hebrew with little dots and dashes under the letters. Those are called nikud, and outside of children's books, poetry and prayer books, nobody uses them.
Real Hebrew, the kind on a street sign or in a newspaper, is consonants only. So you do not sound words out letter by letter the way you learned to read English. You learn to recognise whole word shapes, the same way you recognise "though" and "through" at a glance without spelling them out.
People who learn the alphabet expecting to phonetically decode any word hit a wall around week three and think they have failed. They have not. That is simply not how Hebrew reading works, and knowing it in advance saves a lot of frustration.
It also means vocabulary and reading grow together rather than separately. You can read a word once you know it. Recognising בית as "bayit", meaning house, is one act, not two.
This one surprises people and it is genuinely simple. Five letters take a different form when they are the last letter of a word. Same letter, same sound, different shape.
כ becomes ך, מ becomes ם, נ becomes ן, פ becomes ף, and צ becomes ץ.
That is the entire rule. There are no exceptions and nothing to work out. Learn the five pairs together from the start rather than meeting the final forms later and thinking you have found five extra letters.
Modern Hebrew has merged several sounds that used to be distinct. The letters stayed. So there are pairs that sound identical today and are spelled differently, and only exposure teaches you which is which.
א and ע. Both are effectively silent in modern Israeli speech. There is no sound to tell them apart by. You learn which word takes which, one word at a time.
ח and כ. Both make the throaty "kh". Textbooks say ח comes from deeper in the throat, and most Israelis pronounce them the same.
ק and כ. Both sound like "k" today. They were different historically and modern speech merged them.
ט and ת. Both are "t", with no audible difference at all in modern Hebrew.
ב and ו. ב can be "b" or "v", ו can be "v", "o" or "u". When both land on "v" they sound identical.
ס and ש. ש is usually "sh" but takes an "s" sound in some words, where it collides with ס.
Confusing them creates spelling mistakes that survive for years, because nothing in the sound corrects you. This is the single strongest argument for learning the alphabet with a teacher rather than an app: an app shows you the letter, it does not catch you writing the wrong one.
A handful of letters change sound depending on the word. In fully marked text a dot inside the letter tells you which, and in normal writing there is no dot and you go by familiarity.
ב is "b" or "v". כ is "k" or "kh". פ is "p" or "f". ש is "sh" or "s". And ו does triple duty as "v", "o" or "u".
This sounds like a lot to hold. In practice it resolves quickly, because you meet the same few hundred words constantly and each one settles after a handful of encounters. It is memory, not rules.
The common mistake is drilling the alphabet in isolation until it is perfect, then starting words. That is slower and considerably more boring.
Learn letters inside words from the first day. בית teaches you three letters and a word you will use constantly. A chart teaches you a letter you will forget by Thursday.
Start with words you already half know. שלום, תודה, your own name. Recognition is much easier when you already know what the answer should be.
Read signs and labels rather than textbooks. Street signs, product packaging, shop fronts. Short, repetitive, and everywhere. It is also the first place the writing stops looking like decoration and starts looking like language.
Write by hand, badly. Writing a letter fixes its shape in memory far better than looking at it, and it forces you to notice which letters you keep mixing up.
Do not wait until you can read to start speaking. They are separate skills. Plenty of students hold conversations while still reading slowly, and plenty read well before they will risk a sentence out loud.
The alphabet is the one part of Hebrew you genuinely can teach yourself. The confusable pairs are the part where a teacher saves you years, because nothing in the sound tells you when you have the wrong letter.
Start with one trial lesson: a full 50 minutes, one to one, for $55. Not a sales call, an actual lesson, so by the end you know where you are and whether learning this way suits you. No subscription, and nothing renews.