we use Behrman House and I love their resources. My DH and I use those along with our children and also use The First Hebrew Primer: The Adult Beginner’s Path to Biblical Hebrew, although I will say that it moved quite fast for us in the beginning and we had to repeat chapters to get it all. I would love to use this w/ our children but they are still young (9 & 7) and The First Hebrew Primer really gets too deep into grammar and such for their age, so we’ll use it w/ them in the future.
My family attends a Messianic Jewish congregation and everyone is encouraged to learn biblical Hebrew and biblical Greek, from 3-93, so we all know that we know what our bibles say. In our classes, adults use the children’s primers too, Behrman House has some really good ones, and I wouldn’t feel bad about using them either. Hebrew is totally different and has a totally different alphabet, it is not the same thing as learning Italian or Spanish.
Like Rachel said, define your goals. For my family, knowing what the inspired Word of God says, without having to go through the opinion of a translator is paramount to us, so we are learning Biblical Hebrew. We are open to Modern Hebrew, but its not on the radar right now. And as for learning some of the Hebrew prayers, they are beautiful, and its so nice to learn the prayers that our Messiah would have said when He broke bread… its good stuff. 😉
Oh, and as for Hebrew movies, we don’t own any. I don’t know the ages of your children, but there are Hebrew videos out there, a friend of mine has several of the Shalom Sesame (Hebrew version of Sesame Street) that she said was a fun way to learn Hebrew, she and her 9 yr old enjoyed them along w/ her 3 yr old.
HTH,
Ginnie
