Dialogue: Meeting Someone for the First Time

A first meeting is the smallest complete piece of Hebrew there is. It needs almost no vocabulary, and it needs four grammatical facts that English does not prepare you for at all — three of which you will use in every Hebrew sentence you ever say.

The dialogue below is written for this page. Read it straight through first, out loud if you can, and let it be roughly comprehensible; then work down the annotations, which take the four facts one at a time and point back at the lines they come from.

The dialogue

Two strangers, Dana and Yoni, are queuing at a conference registration desk.

1 · Yoni

2 · Dana

3 · Yoni

4 · Dana

5 · Yoni

6 · Dana

7 · Yoni

8 · Dana

9 · Yoni

10 · Yoni

11 · Dana

12 · Yoni

Five of these twelve lines have no verb in them

Look at lines 3, 4 and 8, and at the way line 9 opens, and try to find the verb. אני יוני, אני דנה, אני מהנדסת, אני עדיין סטודנט — there is nothing there but a pronoun and a noun. נעים מאוד is a single adjective standing alone as a whole utterance.

These are complete sentences. Hebrew has no present-tense is, am or are, and — the framing that actually helps — it never had one, so there is nothing missing. אני מהנדסת is not "I engineer" with a word left out; it is the finished sentence, and adding anything to the middle of it makes it worse rather than better. This is the single most persistent English-transfer error in the language and it has its own page: Hebrew has no am, is or are.

The same emptiness explains line 2. גם אתה נרשם עכשיו? is are you registering now with no are in it, because the Hebrew present tense is the participle נרשם, and a participle needs no auxiliary in front of it.

איך קוראים לך — "what do they call you"

Hebrew's ordinary way of asking someone's name is not built like English's at all. There is no what is and no your. Instead there is a verb in the third person plural with nobody in particular as its subject — they call — plus ל־ with a bound pronoun on the end.

The written form לך is the same for both; only the vowel differs, lekhá to a man and lakh to a woman.

Line 10 gives the other member of the pair. שמי יוני כהן is literally "my name Yoni Cohen" — a possessive suffix bolted onto שֵׁם, and again no verb. This is not a more correct way to say it, and it is not a mistake either: it is a different register. שמי belongs to a stage, a form, a written introduction, a job interview; קוראים לי belongs to a queue. Line 11 is Dana saying exactly that, which is why the dialogue has both.

Your age needs a word English does not have

Line 9 says בן עשרים ושתיים, not עשרים ושתיים on its own. Hebrew does not put a bare numeral after the subject the way English puts one after I'm. It uses בן — literally "son of" — or בת, "daughter of", agreeing with the person whose age it is.

Note also which numerals the age takes. Age counts שנים, which is feminine, so it is עשרים ושתיים and שבע — the bare feminine forms — and not the ־ה-suffixed masculine ones. That inversion is a whole topic of its own, on gender polarity.

Gender runs through the entire clause

This is the fact that makes Hebrew feel relentless at first, and line 9 shows why. Yoni says סטודנט about himself and סטודנטית about his sister, in one breath, because the word changes with the person it describes and not with the person saying it.

The same thing happens to the word you. Hebrew has no neutral second person: it is אתה to a man and את to a woman, and everything that agrees with the addressee moves with it.

Row three is worth a second look: עושה is spelled identically in both columns and read osé or osá. Unpointed Hebrew hides a good deal of this agreement on the page while keeping all of it in the mouth. The pronoun and the chain it drags behind it are on אתה vs את.

One structural point, since a first meeting is exactly where a European learner starts looking for it: Modern Hebrew has no polite second-person pronoun of the French vous or Spanish usted type. אתה and את are what you say to a stranger, to your boss and to a child alike. Formality, where it is wanted, is carried by address nouns — אדוני adoní "sir", גברתי gvirtí "madam" — and by vocabulary, never by a special pronoun.

Saying where you are from

Line 5's מבאר שבע is the whole answer: מ־ glued to the place name, no verb and no I am. The question is מאיפה, one word built from the same מ־ plus where, and Hebrew never leaves the preposition dangling at the end the way English does in where are you from.

If the answer is a country rather than a city, most speakers give the nationality instead — אני ישראלי, אני אמריקאית — which is a suffix rule rather than a vocabulary list, on nationalities and the ־י suffix.

Common Mistakes

1. Agreeing with the wrong person. The commonest error in the whole dialogue, and it fires in both directions: you use את to a woman and then describe her with a masculine noun, or you get the pronoun right and forget the rest of the clause.

2. Giving your age as a bare number. English says I'm twenty-eight and the numeral does the whole job. Hebrew needs בן or בת in front of it, and that word is where the agreement lives.

3. Reaching for a word to sit between אני and the rest. אני דנה and אני מהנדסת feel unfinished to an English ear, and the reflex is to install something — a pronoun, an infinitive, יש. Nothing goes there.

4. Using שמי in the queue, or קוראים לי on the stage. Neither is wrong; each is wrong there. The pair below says the same thing in two registers, and picking the wrong one is the kind of mistake that makes a fluent learner sound oddly stiff or oddly casual.

Key Takeaways

• Five of the twelve lines — 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8 — contain no verb at all. Hebrew has no present-tense copula and never had one: אני דנה, אני מהנדסת and נעים מאוד are finished sentences.
• The everyday name question is איך קוראים לך? — a third-person-plural verb with no real subject, plus ל־ with a bound pronoun. The answer is קוראים לי.
• שמי is the same information in a formal register — a stage, a form, an interview. It is a register pair with קוראים לי, not a right-and-wrong pair.
• Age takes בן or בת plus the numeral, agreeing with the person: אני בן עשרים ושתיים, אני בת עשרים ושתיים. The question is בן כמה אתה? / בת כמה את? Age counts שנים, which is feminine, so the numerals are the bare feminine ones.
• Gender runs through the whole clause. Yoni is a סטודנט and his sister a סטודנטית; you is אתה or את, and the verb, the adjective and בן/בת all follow it.
• Modern Hebrew has no polite second person. אתה and את go to strangers and friends alike; formality is carried by אדוני and גברתי, not by a pronoun.
• Where you are from is מ־ on the place name, and the question word carries the preposition at the front: מאיפה את?