Not a Teach Yourself Manual, November 15, 2001

I found this concise grammar to be extremely accessible and helpful after having completed a couple of years of Hebrew at university. I continue to come back to it for refreshers.

If you don't know any Hebrew yet, or you know very little, this book is not going to teach it to you. Spend some time with a good book-and-tape set, take a course, then buy Glinert.

Useful but limited in scope, July 17, 2003

I recently put this book to the test. I used it as a reference while attending ulpan in Israel. It was very useful up to a point.

The major grammatical categories are all covered in the book. It even covers some of the more advanced concepts like the subjunctive mood or expressing "I used to..." type things. I like the presentation of the "maverick verbs". Construction of the binyanim could have been more clearly presented. It is all there, just not organized in the best way.

The only thing is that the book should have gone into a lot more detail on the use of prepositions. I ended up have several questions that I could not find the answer to. E.g. What is the distinction between l- and 'el when indicating the direction of action? When is b- used instrumentally vs. the direct object marker? Why is etzel+pronominal suffix used as a locative noun?

The book is a good value, with a lot of information at a reasonable price.

Simply the best, May 19, 2003
Reviewer: A reader
This is simply the best review of modern Hebrew grammar I have come across. It is both logical and comprehensive as well as easy to read and is equally useful to those first studying Hebrew, as well as for those who need a refresher.

well done, November 20, 2002

this is a great reference book to modern hebrew. "fresh and accessible" is what it says on the back of the book, and this is exactly how i'd describe it. there are only 104 pages worth of grammar in this book, but in that space it manages to convey all the important aspects of hebrew as it's spoken today -- i.e. making clear the differences between the textbook hebrew you find in many grammars, and actual usage. it's very well organized and the examples are colloquial and quite entertaining [e.g., section 62 on generic plurals -- example sentences are "i hate cockroaches" and "vacuum cleaners always go wrong"].

Very useful, very clear, April 13, 2002

Like other books in the Routledge "Essential Grammar" series that I've come across, this book is well-written and covers immediately useful aspects of the grammar of the language. I am particularly impressed by the author's pointing out of the frequent differences between "standard textbook" Hebrew and colloquial Hebrew as spoken by the man in the street--if you already have some command of the language from formal study and want to make your Hebrew less "schoolboy" and more colloquial, this book will help a lot in that respect.

The example sentences in this book, as in Prof. Glinert's longer grammar of Modern Hebrew, deserve special mention, but as they are frequently mentioned in other reviews, I won't belabor the point.

Not Very Helpful, July 26, 2001
Reviewer: A reader
Despite the other reviews presented here, *I* found the book a little pretentious. Many of the more complex grammatical concepts are just glossed over, or illustrated with non-standard examples. In addition, I found the fact that this author is British to be problemmatic. His background and academic experience tended to make the book come off as pedantic to American readers. References to parts of speech and grammatical elements are often inconsistent and unnecessarily complex. And finally, I found the fact that I had to write for the answers to the self-help exercises inexcusable. What good is a self-paced grammar text without the answers.