Crazy Herbs Hebrew Words - Recently Updated Pages

Illustrations

HFRIED — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:55:10 CST

Go to "Attachments" below.

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Crazy Herb's Hebrew Words Auxiliary Website

HFRIED — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:32:49 CST

This website is an auxiliary website to www.CrazyHerbsHebrewWords.info .

Check out the attachments on the illustrations page.

If you have any contributions to make or would like to know more just email the author at hfried@friedandfried.com .

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Explaining pictures and memory

HFRIED — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:06:43 CST

The essence of the memory tips in his book involves the use of pictures in whatever it is you wish to remember.
Why are pictures effective as mnemonic devices?
The memory of certain experiences can be so powerful they can stay with you a lifetime! One says when remembering such experiences that it is seen in their “mind’s eye” and it is so vivid that a common phrase is, “I remember as if it happened yesterday.” Actual memories are incredibly durable. This is especially true when your emotions are involved. Etched in peoples’ minds in my generation is the exact moment they heard President Kennedy was shot or for most Jews and many others, when they heard that the Western Wall in Jerusalem was liberated in 1967.
I still remember the parking space we stopped at when I was traveling with my brother, Walter, in his Mustang to our classes at the University of Miami when we heard the news that the Israelis had captured the Wall. He had to turn off the highway and stop the car, from the emotion of the moment. I still remember it vividly.
At the time my sister, Linda, was in Israel for her junior year of college and we found out later she had been one of the first Jewish civilians into the Old City when it was liberated. The next time I saw her she described how a bullet has whizzed past her with the sound of a butterfly. How is it I remember her using the word butterfly over forty years later? I had pictured a butterfly fluttering past her ear.

As you may know, it is believed that the mind cannot tell the difference between an actual event and an imaginary event that is sufﬁciently realistically envisioned. In either case it has been memorized in a very powerful way.
Actual events are detected through sensory input in the form of vision, sound, smell, touch and/or hearing. Notice that reading is not one of the senses. By reading, you convert, through imagining the event, the words on the printed page through your imagination to a form of vision and sound and other senses in order to remember the experience. For proof, think of the times you were distracted while you were reading and had to reread the page, perhaps several times before you ﬁnally could remember what you had just read. Only by imagining the scene did the printed page enter your memory.
Why is it hard to remember a long sequence of random numbers but a great story, even a very long and complicated one, is not? A well constructed story has vivid images in which we have become emotionally involved and additionally, each part relates to the parts immediately preceding and following it unlike random numbers. These are the keys to a successful memory system.
Therefore, you must turn the printed or spoken Hebrew words into vivid images to remind you of the meaning of that word. More speciﬁcally, once you have learned this method, the sound of the Hebrew word will call to your mind, a speciﬁc picture that reminds you of its meaning. Once this has become automatic, the picture itself will no longer be needed so that just as when you hear a word in English, its meaning will be called immediately to your mind.
This is not the same as memorizing the English translation of the word. When one memorizes the English translation of a Hebrew word, what actually happens is that the Hebrew word calls into mind the English translation which you then repeat to yourself. My method bypasses the extra step and delay of translating the word to English and allows you to “know” the Hebrew itself.
Just as a scene in a movie is more memorable than a single photograph, if you can provide action along with emotion, and exaggeration they act together to help you remember more effectively than a simple static picture. I call this the “Sounds Like” method because you associate the sound of the Hebrew word with the sound of something that you then use in a picture that reminds you of the meaning of the word. I take no credit for the basic method as it is a common mnemonic device that has been used for centuries if not millennia. I have, though, applied this technique to the study of Hebrew and Jewish Culture and in the process developed a unique method as used later in this book, which, when you are given a Hebrew word, has the ability to create a picture in your mind that:
1 reminds you of its meaning,
2 gives you its proper spelling,
3 reminds you if it is masculine or feminine if it is not
in the typical form,
4 if it is a verb, tells you which of the seven
conjugation forms, known as Binyanim, it takes,
5 when given an English word to translate to Hebrew,
helps you immediately ﬁnd that Hebrew word in your
memory together with all of the above, in addition to
the Hebrew word’s pronunciation,
6 all while you are having fun doing it!
Once the word is learned, the picture often drops off and you are left with the above information imprinted in your memory.

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Index to Crazy Herb's Hebrew Words

HFRIED — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:51:01 CDT

CONTENTS
PREFACE: RABBI BENJAMIN SENDROW v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK viii
EXPLAINING PICTURES AND MEMORY 1
THE “SOUNDS LIKE” METHOD 4
REMEMBERING ITEMS IN A LIST 7
HEBREW MONTHS WITH HOLIDAYS 9
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 19
COLORS 22
LEARNING THE “ALEPH BET” 26
NUMERIC VALUES OF THE HEBREW LETTERS AND “OT-BOSH” 35
MAJOR PROPHETS, MINOR PROPHETS AND WRITINGS 37
WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, HOW AND
HOW MUCH, HOW MANY 43
NAMES OF THE VOWELS 46
IDEAS FOR THE HEBREW SCHOOL TEACHER 50
LEARNING VOCABULARY WITH PERFECT SPELLING 52
MORE VOCABULARY WORDS 55
FEMININE NOUNS THAT APPEAR MASCULINE IN
BOTH SINGULAR AND PLURAL FORM 67
ONLY IN SINGLE FORM 69
EXPRESSIONS 71
PREPOSITIONS – TO, FOR, ON ETC. 75
PRONOUNS 78
POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVES, DIRECT OBJECT
AND INDIRECT OBJECT PRONOUNS 79
LETTER GROUPINGS AND INTERACTIONS 83
BINYANIM– CONVERTING ROOTS INTO VERBS 85
VERB ROOT EXAMPLE 87 THE SEVEN BINYANIM 90
CONJUGATING REGULAR VERBS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE 94 MEMORIZING A VERB’S DEFINITION, SPELLING
AND BINYAN IN ONE STEP 111
THE “SOUNDS LIKE” DICTIONARY 113
APPENDICES
“A” ABOUT THE AUTHOR 139
“B” BACKGROUND 140
“C” SUGGESTED WEB LINKS 141
“D” BIBLIOGRAPHY 142
“E” WHY I BELIEVE THE SYSTEM WORKS 143
“F” USING PICTURES TO DIFFERENTIATE PHONETIC PAIRS 145
“G” TRANSITIVE VERBS INTRANSITIVE VERBS,
DIRECT OBJECTS AND INDIRECT OBJECTS 146
“H” ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS 148
FINAL WORD 150
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Preface to Crazy Herb's Hebrew Words

HFRIED — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:46:56 CDT

PREFACE:

One evening while waiting for our wives to say goodnight to each other after a meeting, I mentioned to Herb Fried that I had never learned the order of the Minor Prophets by heart. By the time our wives were ready to get into the cars (OK, so that might not have been all that short a time), I had them memorized. To this day, if you ask me what book is the third one of the twelve Minor Prophets, I will immediately picture the legs of a three-legged stool saying, “Aim us! Aim us!” The answer, of course, is the prophet Amos.

Why had I mentioned to Herb that after earning a BA in Jewish Studies and rabbinic ordination after six years in rabbinical school, I had never memorized the names of those books in order? Very simple: I knew that Herb would be successful in getting me to memorize them, and that we would have great fun in the process. I knew that from watching Herb teach in the religious school in our synagogue. More accurately, I knew it from watching his students.
When he was a regular teacher, everybody loved his classes, and when he was substituting, every child who saw him hoped it was his or her class that Herb had come to teach. You see, no one had to work in Mr. Fried’s classes. His classes were playtime, an hour of fun and games. We never would have allowed him to do such a thing in our school, of course, if not for the fact that after an hour of Herb’s fun and games, the kids learned more than in a month of regular classes. They may have done no work that day, for example, but every kid in his class could tell you the months of the Hebrew calendar, in order, and name the holidays that fall in that month. But that’s not all. Name a month, and they’ll tell you what number it is. Name a number, and they’ll tell you what month correlates with that number. Not a bad result for any teacher, but when you consider the fact that the kids viewed this method of learning as play, not work, you begin to appreciate the magnitude of what Herb was able to accomplish.

Now he has turned his attention to one of his personal passions, the study of the Hebrew language. Herb quickly saw that his teaching techniques were helping him to learn Hebrew faster and more easily than traditional methods. Why not try that approach with kids? Well, he has, and with the same results as before. You are holding in your hands the key to Herb’s magic. I don’t know how he found the time, but after many hours at the keyboard, Herb has produced this book which enables anyone to teach his approach to the learning of the Hebrew language. Use this book in your school at your own peril. You may soon be deluged by phone calls from parents demanding to know why their children are playing games during religious school time. Unless, of course, they can get used to kids going to religious school cheerfully and learning more than ever while they are there.

Rabbi Benjamin Sendrow 9/3/02
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