🇮🇱 The best books for learning Hebrew

Chayat, Israeli and Kobliner's two-part course is what Israeli universities and most ulpanim actually teach from: graded texts, systematic verb-pattern tables, and exercises that build reading and writing rather than tourist phrases. Work through both volumes and you have a real foundation, which no app in this list will give you. It is almost entirely in Hebrew with minimal English support, assumes a teacher will explain things, and the audio and answer keys are sold as separate items — self-studying it is possible but hard, and buying it outside Israel means going through Judaica booksellers.

A well-organised, linguistically serious but readable account of how Modern Hebrew actually works: binyanim, construct state, word order, prepositions with pronoun suffixes, and the differences between formal writing and speech. It is the book that answers the questions your ulpan teacher waves away, and it is short enough to use as a genuine reference. It is a grammar, not a course — no exercises, no vocabulary building — and its examples lean on transliteration in places, which some learners dislike.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

A reading app built around finishing complete books: you pick a story at your level, tap a word or reveal a sentence's English translation when you get stuck, and it saves the words you looked up. There is one complete free book in every language and you can read a free chapter on the website without installing anything; the rest of the 1,100-book library is paid. The library is uneven: Ukrainian, Indonesian and French have dozens of stories, while Icelandic, Estonian and several Balkan languages have one or two. It is not the same as Storyglot's European Portuguese readers (storyglot.com), which are a separate project with the same name.