SmartHebrewFlashcards vs Aramaic Alphabet

Smart Hebrew Flashcards is an app written by an experienced Sunday School Hebrew Teacher to make learning Hebrew more fun for all students. It’s great to use on-line – just share screen and just ask students to take turns guessing a flashcard. Smart Hebrew Flashcards is perfect for the prospective bar or bat mitzvah student and anyone who wants to easily improve their Hebrew reading and vocabulary. What’s great about it? You can learn common Hebrew words. It includes Hebrew prayers and holiday words that are hard to find in other apps -- and are much needed by Sunday School teachers preparing bar and bat mitzvah students! No setup required for Hebrew Teachers -- just ask students to install and you are off and running. Just finished testing for three years on a group of 4th graders that all are well into their Bar/Bat Mitzvah Prep now. The entire religious service makes more sense if one knows the Hebrew that is being spoken. This app teaches the words that form the foundation of many prayers, so it fosters a meaningful connection with previous generations. Kids love it so much that a group of 5th grade Sunday School students came to an extra class every Tuesday evening for six months to play the game and help develop it. “Smart Hebrew Flashcards” are “Smart” because the Progress screen shows exactly how students are doing on particular words, and perhaps more importantly, how much time they spend on a particular word. Teachers need to know that to plan what to focus on. Bar/Bat Mitzvah students get a head start by learning some Biblical Hebrew. The app is really a mitzvah – a good deed. The app will be free. How did it develop? During five years of teaching Hebrew, the App’s creator discovered that students LOVED flash cards more than any other part of the class. They worked well for students learning in a group or on their own. The class played a “game” by taking turns reading the words . During this past two years, the class couldn’t play a physical flashcard game, so the Sunday School teacher searched for suitable flashcard games online. But there were none that were both easy to use, and taught both Hebrew prayers and holiday words. He didn’t find a single app. So given that the Sunday School teacher is also a computer science professor, he created an app, and started teaching his Sunday School students online. The app has been used the last six months by a 5th grade class, with no extra setup by the teacher. The Director of Religious Education (who has come to numerous classes where the app has been used) says, “The Sunday School kids need to learn what the prayers and Jewish holiday words mean--and so do I! But there was nothing that suited our needs, so this one was developed. It’s been fun meeting every week to test the app. The kids don’t like to miss--and neither do I. For the last month, I have been practicing 6 days a week for 5-10 minutes, and I know a lot of words in the prayers and songs now. It’s revolutionized my whole experience of Jewish services. Oh, and it does teach a lot of other words too! I’m just a religious educator, so the prayers are what I care about most.” During the testing period, a class of 5th grade students have been relentless with software requirements. They know what an app should do, and they refused to play until the app was not only fun, but behaved as they thought it should. Their feedback has guided the entire development. Version 1 has been in the app store for a couple of years and over time it did not work on newer versions of IOS. All of that has been fixed and numerous features have been added. Enjoy and send us feedback at info@smarthebrewflashcards.com.

This app can help you get to know the imperial Aramaic alphabet. Scroll through the letters and study their shapes and sounds. Practice tracing each one until you're familiar-- then quiz yourself on the letters! This writing system was adapted by the Arameans from Phonoecian in the 8th Century BC. Note it is written right-to-left, like most other Semitic writing systems. That is why the first letter is listed on the top right and they go right to left, up to down from Alaph to Taw. It was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes—a precursor to Arabization centuries later—including among Assyrians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews (but not Samaritans), who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. (The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Paleo-Hebrew). The letters in the Aramaic alphabet all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. The Aramaic alphabet is historically significant since virtually all modern Middle Eastern writing systems can be traced back to it. That is primarily due to the widespread usage of the Aramaic language after it was adopted as both a lingua franca and the official language of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, and their successor, the Achaemenid Empire. We provide transliteration equivalents for each letter in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts (all of which can be used in the quiz).