Colloquial Hebrew (Colloquial Series)

Rating:
Summary: finally an effective course!
Review: As an Israeli, I gave this course to my friend who has been struggling with the language for many years. This book helped her to get along in daily life without having to use a dictionary. All of a sudden, her questions were understood and more importantly she could understand the answers...The language now make sense to her and she had great fun with the exercises. The recording helped her to pronounce everything correctly and got her up to speed very quickly.
It's worth every cent! Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: I'm very impressed.
Review: I've just received the book, tape and CD combination, and I'm very impressed. Like another reviewer, I am frustrated that after several years of attempting to learn the language, I'm not at the level of facility as I have been after only one or two years of other languages.

The dialogs are spoken by natives, so it helps your pronunciation.

The book and CDs complement one another, but don't totally duplicate the information the other. For example, the book has written exercises and cultural notes, while the CD has an instructor, suggestions about how to use the system, comments and explanations about the dialogue, and role play exercises with prompts.

I really like the fact that the book doesn't assume I'm a college student, and isn't full of vocabulary about dorms, classrooms and libararies, which I'm very unlikely to use, but could pick up if I knew the language.

I highly recommend the edition I bought, which includes CDs and tapes. The CD tracks are portions of each unit, so you can review in smaller chunks. The tapes can be used in special foreign language learning tape players that replay even smaller sections repeatedly.

One note, It's an English book and CD series. The instructor has a standard (BBC) English accent. Some Americans have problems understanding this accent. I was raised bi-culturally, so I don't have this problem. I also think that's likely to be a problem older Americans might have, and younger ones don't.