Making a Request Politely

The most useful Hebrew request is not an imperative and not a long equivalent of English would you mind. It is אפשר efshár followed by an infinitive—or simply by the thing you want. In everyday Israeli Hebrew אפשר קפה? is a complete, conventionally indirect request: literally “is coffee possible?”, naturally “can I have a coffee?”

That compactness can look blunt on the page, but the research says otherwise. In the Hebrew data of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP; Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989), conventionally indirect strategies were the majority, and later work found true imperatives almost absent from elicited Hebrew requests. Natural Hebrew is often concise without being socially unsoftened.

אפשר: a request with no personal subject

אפשר is impersonal: it does not say who can act, and it does not change for gender or number. With an infinitive it asks whether an action is possible; with a bare noun phrase it lets the setting supply “get,” “have,” “order” or “use.” Both patterns are (neutral; extremely common in conversation and service encounters).

English normally names an agent—can you bring…?—or inserts have: can I have…? Hebrew can leave both unspoken. This is not careless ellipsis. אפשר presents the desired action as an available possibility, allowing the listener to infer the practical next step.

Add בבקשה bevakashá when the imposition is larger, the encounter is more formal, or you simply want the politeness to be explicit. It can follow אפשר or come later in the request; one occurrence is normally enough.

אולי: much more than “maybe”

אולי ulái is the second workhorse. CCSARP singles it out as a multifunctional downgrader with only partial equivalents in the other languages studied. In requests it does four related jobs:

The last example is the trap: אולי does not automatically make an utterance gentle. With sharp intonation and a negative social context, it strengthens a direct demand. Form, intonation and relationship work together.

A practical request ladder

Hebrew has several ways to request the same outcome. The choice reflects the size of the request and the relationship, not a mechanical scale from “rude” to “polite.”

The future forms תוכל / תוכלי are morphologically future but pragmatically present: “will you be able to…?” They agree with the addressee. The hypothetical past הייתי רוצה agrees with the speaker through רוצה/רוצה; the form printed above is masculine. See softening commands for the morphology behind future-as-request forms.

What the studies actually found

CCSARP's elicited written scenarios classified Hebrew requests as 33% direct, 59% conventionally indirect and 8% hints. For comparison, the reported direct/conventionally-indirect/hint figures were 10/82/8 for Australian English, 24/69/7 for Canadian French and 49/58/2 for Argentinean Spanish. Hebrew sits third when the four are ordered from least to most direct, while conventional indirectness remained its majority strategy. One caution is visible in the published comparison itself: the three Argentinean Spanish figures as reproduced add to more than 100, so they are useful for the reported ranking but should not be recombined as a sample total.

Within Hebrew's conventionally indirect requests, the reported subtypes were approximately 41% ability (“can”), 33% possibility with אפשר, 18% willingness with מוכן, and 7% אולי; rounding explains the missing percentage point. Bar On and Meir (2022) add a useful correction: among 2,160 elicited scenarios they found only 18 imperatives. Hebrew-dominant participants preferred declarative framing where English-dominant participants preferred interrogatives, and used בבקשה more than the English-dominant group used please.

These are strong comparisons, but both studies used elicited written responses, not recordings of spontaneous requests in cafés, homes or offices. The numbers describe those datasets; they are not a claim that every real conversation follows the same proportions.

Common Mistakes

1. Giving לעזור an English-style direct object. Hebrew “help” takes ל־, not את.

2. Translating “talk to” with ל־. Everyday לדבר selects עם for the person you converse with.

3. Mixing feminine and masculine marking in the wanted action. A wanted action by another person uses ש־ + future, and that future form agrees with the addressee.

Key Takeaways

• אפשר + infinitive and אפשר + noun phrase are the core conventionally indirect request patterns.
• אולי can soften, mark a hint, signal a request or—under sharp intonation—intensify a demand.
• בבקשה makes politeness explicit; תוכל / תוכלי agrees with the person being asked.
• Hebrew often prefers a compact impersonal or declarative request where English prefers a longer question.
• The available comparative evidence comes from elicited written tasks. It supports careful comparison, not a stereotype about every Israeli conversation.