Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards in Anki

Update: See links to the corrected Flashcard files below.

Last summer I made a set of 270 Biblical Hebrew picture flashcards for our introductory Hebrew students:

The images help create a direct link between Hebrew words and their meaning. There is no English on the cards because our goal is reading fluency in Hebrew. Bypassing English wherever possible — and avoiding the habit of mentally translating as one reads — speeds up the reading (and language learning) process. 

The cards are designed to be accessible to beginners and still useful to more advanced students. Students who have learned the alphabet can practice reading words they have already been introduced to in class, and ignore the smaller print around the borders of the cards. Some cards appear twice, first in the participle / qotel form (the normal Biblical Hebrew way of conveying present time):

After the qatal / perfect form has been introduced in class, the same picture can be reintroduced with the standard dictionary form and more grammatical information in small print:

In the top right corner, we learn that the word is a verb (פֹּעַל) that occurs in the Qal Binyan (קַל) and belongs to a class of weak verbs with an aleph in the first root letter (פ׳א). 

The bottom right corner draws on the method Randall Buth uses in his 500 Friends Hebrew word list to indicate succinctly what the verb looks like in a variety of verb patterns. (If you have studied Hebrew, you will see what I mean.)

The bottom left corner classifies the word in one of several semantic domains—in this case, food (מַאֲכָל). 

The cards can, of course, be sorted and reviewed in categories (e.g., all words in the piel Binyan or all words in a particular semantic domain).

 

Noun cards are similar:

In the top right corner we learn that the word is a feminine (נְקֵבָה) noun (שֵׁם עֶצֶם). The bottom right corner provides singular and plural absolute and construct noun forms.

Now that the school year is over, I have had time to complete a digital version of the flashcards for use in Anki's spaced repetition flashcard app. Here is an example:

The back looks like this:

Among other benefits, the digital version makes it far easier to sort and review specific kinds of cards. The digital version also makes it possible for me to share the cards freely online. You can download them here:

Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards 

Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards (Reversed)  

Update: This post now links to a corrected version of the Anki Flashcard files. (Due to an error in my Excel spreadsheet, the tags on the original card decks were misaligned; the image filenames have also been simplified in this version.)

In this follow-up post I provide a brief set of instructions for those who are new to Anki: https://gervatoshav.blogspot.com/2023/06/biblical-hebrew-picture-flashcards-in.html