Colloquial Hebrew 1.0 was developed in close contact with college students of Hebrew and it uses authors instruction method of presentation and repetition, interactive drills and separate vocabulary and grammar tutorials.

Target students:

Colloquial Hebrew 1.0 is intended for ages 12 to adult, but even younger children can use the vocabulary and the presentation parts.

Course features:
 

• The course is intended for the beginners level Hebrew but the alphabet is a prerequisite. A student that completed the course will be able to participate in a simple conversation in Hebrew.
• Grammar: the noun in masculine and feminine, plural and singular, the verb in pa'al, piel, and ni'fal, present and past tense, prepositions in relationship to a verb or location, genitive, pronouns.
• Vocabulary subjects: colors, professions, family, buildings, city and transportation, nationalities, countries, languages, geography, map reading, directions, foods, drinks,  parts of the day and the week, numbers, time, furniture, clothing and the calendar.
• 14 interactive games and vocabulary drills that teach over 500 words.
• Idiomatic phrases are drilled as vocabulary.

•  PC 486; Pentium recommended
•  12 MB RAM
•  256 VGA or higher color display
•  Windows 3.10 or higher, Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 recommended
•  Sound card
•  Speakers or headphones
•  Mouse
•  2x or faster CD-ROM drive

For Windows 95
1. Insert the CD-ROM disk into the CD-ROM drive and wait 10 seconds. The program will run automatically.

For Windows 3.x
1. Insert the CD-ROM disk into the CD-ROM drive.
2. Select Run from File menu of Program Manager and enter: D:\QHebrew.exe.
3. Consult your Windows manual about creating an icon to Qhebrew.exe in Program Manager for your convenience.
 
 

Using Colloquial Hebrew 1.0:

There is no need to go through the program chapter by chapter. You might want to skip some units and return to them latter. Simply choose the chapter you like from the main menu by clicking on it. You can now decide if you continue to the next unit, go to the previous unit or again go to the main menu and pick a new chapter.
 

TABLE OF CONTENT
 

Target students

Course features

Hardware requirements

Running Colloquial Hebrew 1.0

Using Colloquial Hebrew

Navigation guide for  Colloquial Hebrew 1.0

Lessons subjects list

Typical units:

Presentation units

Glossary units

Drill units

Grammar units

Troubleshooting

Credits

Rule 1

You control the program by the mouse: by pointing and clicking, or by dragging objects with it. There are no keyboard commands, but you will be typing answers for some drills.

Rule 2

The program is divided into units. To go to a unit simply click on the unit of your chose in the main menu. For the correspondence between the graphics and the unit subject please refer to the figure 7 bellow.

The main menu page of Colloquial Hebrew 1.0 looks like that:
 

 

Each lesson chapter  on that diagram is represented by a graphic. By simply clicking on that graphic you go to the presentation unit of that lesson. The lessons in their turn are divided into a presentational unit, the grammar unit that explains the grammar of this particular lesson, a vocabulary unit, where the vocabulary is presented by either graphic-sound or word-sound-translation; and finally the drill unit where the material presented at the lesson is drilled.
 
Rule 3

Inside of the units you can navigate to the next and previous units using the gray arrows located  on the sides of the unit:

Navigating inside the lesson:

The following two arrows are to be used to go back and forward:

  Click on this arrow to go forward. Remember, the direction follows the Hebrew writing and the Hebrew page order which is from right to left!

 
Click on this arrow to go back.
 
 

Rule 4

Every basic unit is supplied with additional navigational devices:
 

* Clicking on the button "exit" will automatically end the program.

* Clicking on the button "home" will bring you to the main menu of the program with 23 lessons represented by graphics. You can choose any lesson there.

* Clicking on the button "notepad"  will open the standard Notepad program. If you want, you can take notes as a text file.
 

* Clicking on the button "glossary" will bring you to a page that displays the glossary of a current unit.

* Clicking on the button "grammar" will bring you to the page where the grammar of a current unit is displayed.

* Clicking on the button "drill" will bring you to the page where you could drill what you have learned until now.

*  Clicking on this button will start the unit display. There are similar buttons in the grammar pages.

 
Lesson subjects
 

Presentation units:

Presentation screen of the lesson 1 is a typical presentation unit.
The name and the number of the lesson is displayed in big letters on the top left corner of the page.
 

Pressing a  green "start" button located under the header will make graphics to appear, phrases to be heard, and displayed in writing.
Here a picture of a book will appear, and the voice saying: SEPHER will be heard. The word will be simultaneously displayed in writing. Later the same picture will appear accompanied by a writing ZEH SEPHER and voice annotation to that sentence.
The student has to guess that the first one means a book, and the second: this is a book. One can check his or her understanding by going to the glossary unit and then to the grammar unit where the phrases are explained in details.

A different type of presentation unit which resembles more a glossary unit is the one of lesson 21. Different objects are displayed on the page. These objects are clickable and one learns by clicking on them, listening and repeating. Every pronounced word also appears in writing.
For example clicking on a chair will make the word KISE pronounced and the writing will simultaneously appear in the gray blank space.
 
 Glossary units:

One reaches the glossary units through the presentation units by clicking the "glossary" button on the presentation screens.

There are two types of glossary unit: one is presenting the words by linking graphic to sound and another by the linking word/ sound/ translation.
Every glossary unit presents vocabulary of a lesson. For example the glossary unit of lesson 1 includes only the vocabulary of that lesson. Sometimes two lessons will share the same glossary unit.
The word/ sound/ translation units have scrollable lists of nouns.
 

If one is not sure about his understanding of the word SEPHER, one can choose that word from the list and click on it. The translation of the word will appear in a blank space in the middle and the word will be pronounced:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
Another type of a glossary unit is linking graphics to sound. The screen displays pictures and if one click on them he hears sounds. Often there is a blank space in which the writing of the clicked word appears.

Sometimes you are offered a red button ”Next” to follow instead of returning to the lesson. Pressing on the red "Next" button  brings the participant to the drill unit related to the same lesson the glossary unit is connected to.
When you finish working with the glossary unit, remember to press the button in the upper right corner to close the page. If you leave the page open, nothing wrong will happen, but leaving too many pages open distracts your attention, and drains the computer resources.
 
 
 

Drill units:
 

The drills units are different from one chapter to another. They check different skills on each level of the program. However they also can be categorized according to their use.
There are 5 types of  drill units:

1. Drag and drop drills.
2. Random questions drills.
3. Pre-defined question drills.
4. Timed questions drills.
5. Fill in the blank drills.

1. Drag and drop drills are used to test the ability to categorize objects according to a particular criteria given as a set of instructions to that unit. On different drills the participants are asked to decide if the objects (nouns or adjectives) have masculine or feminine gender, if the object is a noun, a pronoun or a verb, or if the teacher works in a hospital or at school.
Parts of the objects on the unit are draggable elements and the participant has to drag them using the left mouse button to a chest designated for it. After the object is been dragged to the right chest, the student has to release the mouse button. If the object was dragged to a right chest it will disappear, but if the object was "misplaced" it will return to its previous place on unit. While dragged, the object name or a related  sentence will be pronounced.
The objects are usually graphics but sometimes they are draggable words displayed in writing as one can see on the illustration bellow.
 

 
(Drill unit - lesson 3)

In lesson 3 one should drag the objects to the ”masculine” or ”feminine” chest according to the gender of a particular object. The gender is given through colors and which is both written as a word and given as a property to the graphics. Both the words and the graphics are draggable.
 
 

2. Random questions drills are used to test understanding of a pronounced phrase. A start button is located under the question field. Clicking on that button will display the first sentence. After the participant listens to the question pronounced and displayed in writing he clicks the right graphic to indicate the choice that matches the answer. If he has chosen right, the next random question will be displayed and pronounced. If he has chosen wrong, a sound of laughter will be heard and one  have to answer the same question again.
Since the questions are randomly displayed, it can happen that the same question will be repeated more then once. If one does not want to test himself on that question again he has to click the start button  to hear a different question.

(Drill unit - lessons 7 and 8)

The drill unit on the example above tests the ability to understand personal pronouns and professions. Clicking on the start button will make the first question appear on a white space above the start button and pronounced simultaneously. The participant then have to give his or her answer by clicking on the graphic that will best correspond to the phrase he heard.
 
 
 
 
 

3. Pre-defined questions drills like the random questions drills are used to test phrase understanding. One clicks the start button only once. After that the questions are be presented to the student in a pre-defined order. Only after the student has completed the round of questions is he allowed to go to another page. Otherwise he will have to repeat the question sequence from the start.
After the student have listened to the question pronounced and/or displayed in writing he has to click the right object to indicate the choice that matches the answer according to his understanding. If he has chosen right, the next question will be displayed and pronounced. If he has chosen wrong, a sound of laughter will be heard and one will answer the same question again.

 

(Drill unit - lesson 20)

In the drill for lesson 20 the student can test his ability to understand numbers.
Clicking on the start button will make a voice pronounce telephone numbers. There is no pause between the numbers and the student has to click the telephone buttons  to "dial".
If he has dialed right, Danny will ”answer”. If he has dialed wrong he will have to re-diale the number from the start. He can however click on the start button as many times as he wants to hear the telephone numbers pronounced again.
 
 
 
 
 
 

4. Timed questions drills. Are similar to the random and or the pre-defined choice questions drill units. The difference between them is that the timed choice questions give the student a limited time to fulfill the task. If the time is expired the student will be forced to start the drill all over again.

5. Fill in the blanks. Are used to check the ability to write the right ending to the genitive. The student of Hebrew has to write his input in Hebrew. We include the table of Hebrew alphabet that we use. The keys correspond to the standard US keyboard.
 
 

(Drill unit - grammar to lesson 10)

In the illustration above the student is being asked to decline the genitive by filling in the right pronominal. He has to write the missing ending in Hebrew in the designated blank space and press the "enter" key.
If he declines right, the program will accept the writing and the letters will become blue. If the declination has been written wrong, the letters will become red and disappear after the enter key is pressed. The student is welcome to try to input the writing as many times as he wants. There are no time limitats.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Grammar units:

Grammar units are used as clarifications to the sentence structures used in the presentation units. Often there is an additional drill unit adjacent to the grammar unit.
All the grammar units are organized in the same manner. These are presentation units in which the tables and grammatical explanation are displayed accompanied by music in a timed way. The explanations are in English. The tables are both in English and in Hebrew to clarify the grammatical structure.

The student can choose whether he wants or does not want to accompany his studies of grammar by Israeli music. He can turn of and on the music anytime if he wants to.
There is only one song per page, the participant cannot change that.
 

  The music switch is located in the left top side of the page. Click on to start the music. Click it again to stop the music. There is only one tune per grammar page.

 This green button is located in the top left side of the page. Click on it to start the presentation.
 

Troubleshooting:

Bellow is a summary of anticipated problems as well as the most common questions the author was asked by her students.
 
1. The program responces to clicking are slow.

This is a typical complication if you have a slow CD-ROM drive and a 486 processor.
The CD-ROM works much slower then the hard drive.
Disk cache program sits between the physical disk drive and the program, reserving an area in the memory that stores the information most recently received from the drive.
That is to say the computer reads the information you give it by clicking from the memory. And it takes few seconds between you click and the memory receives the information from the drive and then executes the command.
Therefore when you click on an object allow few seconds for a CD-ROM to respond.
Remember that your command is traveling much longer way then it would if it would physically sit on the hard drive. Do not click impatiently immediately after the first click.

If you did click to many times it will cause the program to perform the same command several times, and therefore slow down the next performance. If you clicked too much and you have less then 12 MB RAM you will ran into memory problems: computer will start executing other commands then those you gave it and you might receive error messages.
In that case, simply exit the program and restart the computer. Remember not to click too often next time.

2. Navigation does not bring you to a right place:

This is a problem that might occur if you have too many pages opened and you operate all of them simultaneously. To avoid this problem remember to close your grammar, vocabulary, and drill pages as soon as you have finished reviewing them.
This problem should not occur if you advance by prescribed order, but is met by those who jump from one lesson to another without closing the drills and the vocabulary pages.
To avoid  the problem simply close the pages you do not use.
If the problem persists, or you meet an error massage, restart the computer.
 

3. Two lessons share a common drill or a glossary unit:

This is not a mistake. It just means that two lessons share the some vocabulary and that I united them to make the things easier.

4. My mouse does not work right!

You cannot run the program without a mouse, but the mouse configuration is not a part of the program.
Check the cable connecting the mouse to the computer; re-install the mouse driver; or try the neighbor's mouse.
 
5. The sound does not play!

This is not a part of the program. We do not install a sound driver, but use the existing one instead.
You need Sound Blaster compatible sound card to be a part of your system, before you start using the program.  If you experience problems with the sound, double check your sound driver and the card.

6. The music in the grammar unit does not play!

Try to click the music button again. If this does not work, close the grammar unit and open it again.
If the music still does not play, the fault might be in your sound card. Music (MIDI) files are played by a different system then the voice recordings (WAV) files. Some older sound cards have only WAV playing capacity.

7. I cannot write Hebrew on my computer!

Although the Hebrew fonts are imbedded into the Colloquial Hebrew 1.0, they do not become a part of your system otherwise. You should be able to write Hebrew in the designated places in the program, but not if you open WordPad or any other text editor.
To be able to write Hebrew with a minimal adjustment you need a Hebrew font to be installed on your system.
That however will not enable you to write from right to left. To answer some Hebrew related software problems or look for utilities and fonts go to:

http://home6.swipnet.se/~w-67727

8. The program does not start automatically from my CD-ROM drive:

The program is designed to start by itself in Windows 95.
You most likely have Windows 3.x. Double-click on Qhebrew.exe to go to the first page.

9. Any other problems?
Contact the author by e-mail: multimedia.swipnet@.se
 

 Credits and copyright:

1. Graphic design, sounds and programming design : © Sonia Tintarev 1997.

2. Graphics: Corel Gallery2.

3. The program written with Asymetrix Toolbook.

4. The author thanks Uppsala University faculty and students for support and encouragement.

5. And last but not the least I want to thank my husband, Kyril Tintarev, for his endless (almost) patientce.