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Ed.Tech

Hebrew Learning Software

The industry standard language-learning software is, and has been for some time, Rosetta Stone. Their "immersion" approach to language - which guides you through progressing levels of linguistic complexity sans translation, relying on you, the user, to pick up cues from photos and audio samples to identify the scenario - lays claim to being the best way to comprehensively and rapidly acquire a new language. Rosetta Stone works; I know because I've used it and I have friends who have used it with great success. The only downside to Rosetta Stone is the several-hundred-dollar price tag. For all three levels of Hebrew (their language courses all develop over three levels - beginning, intermediate, and advanced) the price tag exceeds $500. The price points are similar for their other language courses.

 

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Transliterate

Transliterate is a sweet little Mac app from the folks at DeepIT. It includes a Serbian-Latin dictionary, a Russian-Latin dictionary, a Caesar Cipher dictionary, and my Hebrew-Latin dictionary.

The cool thing about Transliterate is that you can create your own custom dictionary pretty easily. Dictionary plists are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Transliterate, and if you want to open one up you'll see how to create it. Simply create a dictionary and send it to the developers and they'll include it in the next version.

My Hebrew-Latin dictionary is included in the current 2.0.2 version, available here. It includes all the Hebrew consonants and vowels, and works well transliterating from Hebrew to English using standard IPA and accepted Hebrew transliteration notation. Transliterating from English to Hebrew, however, is a bit iffy, as I haven't included all the character sets that could be used for sounding out vowels, and Hebrew is written from right-to-left, which isn't supported in Transliteration (yet?).

You can check out the rest of DeepIT's products at http://deepit.ru.

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