A pair of Israeli expats in Brighton have written a book to help you and your children learn Hebrew, while raising a few smiles at the same time.
Co-author Yael Breuer, a charity worker who has been teaching Hebrew privately for over 20 years, based Hilarious Hebrew on her tried and tested method of making up silly sentences to help pupils remember vocabulary.
Ms Breuer said that there were "20 or so sentences that I was using because they always added some laughter to the class and people remembered the words that way".
The technique caught the imagination of her Israeli friend, musician Eyal Shavit, and he began sending her his own comical phrases.
"We were texting each other sentences to make each other laugh. After a while, we had hundreds of them," said Ms Breuer.
The pair decided to publish the book themselves and spent over a year compiling the manuscript, which contains 235 sentences complete with humorous illustrations from Aubrey Smith, who is also Brighton-based.
One illustration shows a grinning bear in swimming trunks diving into a pool. The text reads: "The bear wanted a swim, so it dove into the pool. The Hebrew word for 'bear' is dov."
A sprinkling of celebrity names make up some of the sentences, such as "The actor Tom Selleck loves his beetroot" - the Hebrew for beetroot is sellek; or "The fastest car in the world belongs to Barack Obama. It goes like lightning" - bah'rak means lightning.
Journalist Julie Burchill is a fan of the method and is quoted in the book's blurb: "Even a dummy like me, who has a Hebrew reading age of four to five after five years of trying, can make sense of these gorgeous foolproof lessons."
Ms Breuer said: "Learning a language is hard work. This doesn't replace grammar. It is just another dimension that makes the process more enjoyable.
"I bumped into someone I taught 22 years ago. She started reciting the sentences to me - she said they were still completely ingrained in her brain."
