modern hebrew on memrise

1. Adjectives
In this lesson, we are going to discuss adjectives in
Hebrew. This will allow us to grow our vocabulary
and create more complex sentences than what you
have seen before.

2. Adjectives
Adjectives modify nouns in a sentence. The red
ball, the tall building. In English the adjective
comes before the noun as you have seen in the
previous two examples.
A Hebrew adjective almost always appears after
the noun. In Hebrew you would say “the ball red”
or “the building tall”.
Like nouns and verbs, adjectives use suffixes.

3. Adjectives
Fortunately for us, the suffixes used by adjectives
are exactly the same as for nouns.
The adjective ending used must match the noun in
both gender (masculine or feminine) and number
(singular or plural).
A masculine plural noun needs a masculine plural
adjective.
Masculine Feminine
Singular --- ‫,-ת‬ ‫-ה‬
Plural ‫-ים‬ ‫-ות‬

4. Adjectives
One very useful thing that an adjective can tell you if
whether the noun is masculine or feminine. You can
tell most nouns by the nouns ending, however some
feminine nouns use masculine ending and vise
versa.
The adjective will use feminine endings if the noun
is feminine and masculine endings when the noun is
masculine even if the noun itself doesn’t.

5. Adjectives
Let’s look at some examples:
‫ילד‬‫עשיר‬ (a rich boy) masculine noun
‫ילדה‬‫עשירה‬ (a rich girl) feminine noun (notice the endings)
‫ילדים‬‫עשירים‬ (rich children) masculine noun
‫ילד‬‫עשירות‬ ‫ות‬ (rich girls) feminine noun
‫אישה‬‫עשירה‬ (a rich woman) feminine noun
‫נשים‬‫עשירות‬ (rich women) feminine noun
Notice that the last example uses the feminine plural
ending for the adjective even though the noun uses the
masculine plural ending. This indicates the noun is
irregular and is feminine instead of masculine as it appears.

6. Adjectives - Definitiveness
We discussed definite and indefinite nouns in lesson
3. You know that a noun is definite when it is
prefixed by the letter ‫.ה‬ Adjectives can also be
definite or indefinite and this can tell you whether
you are dealing with an attributive adjective or a
predicate adjective.

7. Attributive Adjectives
Attributive adjectives are what we have been
discussing in this lesson so far. They directly modify
a noun. (big building, fat cat, orange carrot). If an
adjective is to be used as an attributive adjective, it
must not only match the noun in gender and
number, but also in definitiveness. If the noun is
definite, the adjective must also be definite.
‫האישה‬‫העשירה‬ (the rich woman)
‫תפוח‬‫אדום‬ (a red apple)
‫החתולים‬‫השחורים‬ (the black cats)
Notice that the adjective has the definite article whenever
the noun does.

8. Attributive Adjectives
One tricky aspect of attributive adjectives is that the
definite article is not used for proper nouns (people’s
names, specific towns/countries, etc.). These nouns
are considered definite even without the definite
article because they are specific. Therefore the
adjective must have the definite article to be
attributive.
‫מצרים‬‫הגדולה‬ (great Egypt)
‫הישן‬ ‫דוד‬ (old David)
You can never have a definite adjective for an
indefinite noun.

9. Predicate Adjectives
A predicate adjective is a modifier that follows a
linking verb. The boy is tall, the building is ancient,
the dog is brown.
A predicate adjective must match the noun in
gender and number but NOT definitiveness.
Predicate adjectives can come before or after the
noun, but after is more common.

10. Predicate Adjectives
‫הכלב‬‫הזקן‬ (attributive) the old dog
‫הכלב‬‫אדום‬ (predicate) the dog is red
‫אדום‬‫הכלב‬ (predicate reverse order) the dog is red
‫גדול‬ ‫דוד‬ (predicate) David is great
Notice that ‫כלב‬ is definite but ‫אדום‬ is not. This
indicates a predicate adjective. Also the last
example shows ‫,דוד‬ which is a definite noun
(person’s name) and ‫גדול‬ which is indefinite. This
indicates that ‫גדול‬ is a predicate adjective.

11. Predicate Adjectives
One note on adjectives:
If a noun is indefinite and so is the adjective the
adjective can act as either attributive or predicate.
You must determine its function from context.
‫אדום‬ ‫כלב‬ can mean either “a red dog” or “a dog is
red”.

12. Adjectives
One last concept is that some adjectives end in the letter
‫.י‬ ‫מודרני‬ (modern) for example. When an adjective ends
in ‫,י‬ the ‫י‬ does not drop out in the other forms. You must
add the plural endings and keep the ‫י‬ in the adjective.
‫מודרני‬
‫מודרנית‬
‫מודרניים‬
‫מודרניות‬
This can be confused with another form that we will learn
later called the dual form.