Hebrew Flash Cards — Hebrew Vocabulary & Verb Flashcards for Anki

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For Hebrew learners

A set of Anki flashcard decks for learning Modern Hebrew — vocabulary, verb conjugations, and more. All words include nikkud (vowel marks), audio, and are sorted by frequency so you learn the most useful words first.

What's included

• Vocabulary — ~9,100 Hebrew words with pronunciation audio, roots, example sentences from Hebrew literature, images, and frequency rankings.
• Verb conjugations — 71 core verbs fully conjugated in all tenses and persons, covering all seven binyanim (verb patterns).
• Confusables — Words that look the same without vowel marks (e.g., דָּבָר "thing" vs. דִּבֵּר "spoke") shown side by side so you can tell them apart.
• Noun plurals — Practice forming singular↔plural pairs, with a focus on irregular plurals and common patterns.
• All-in-one — A combined deck with everything above, organized as subdecks.

You can download and import any deck individually — or use the combined deck to get everything at once.

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Just give me the flashcards

1. Download the .apkg files from Releases
2. Double-click to import into Anki (free, cross-platform)
3. Start studying

All decks can be imported independently — pick just the ones you want. Re-importing the same file later updates your deck without losing study progress.

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What's in the vocabulary deck

Each note generates up to three cards:

Hebrew → English: See the Hebrew word (with nikkud) + hear audio → recall the meaning.

English → Hebrew: See the English meaning → recall the Hebrew word. When multiple words share the same English meaning, a disambiguation hint (part of speech + binyan) helps you know which word is expected.

Sentence Cloze: A Hebrew sentence with the target word blanked out → fill in the missing word. Only generated for words with a vetted example sentence. Tests recognition in context.

Fields on each card:

Field	Example
Hebrew word (nikkud)	שָׁמַר
Meaning	kept, watched over
Root	שמ״ר
Part of speech	פועל — פָּעַל
Without nikkud	שמר
Related words	שׁוֹמֵר, שְׁמִירָה (grouped by Part of Speech)
Example sentence	from nikkud'd Hebrew books
Audio	pronunciation from pealim.com
Frequency rank	#412
Image / Emoji	for concrete nouns
Plural form	for nouns: רבים: שֻׁלְחָנוֹת
Disambiguation hint	for ambiguous Eng→Heb cards

Cards are presented in frequency order — Anki will show you the most common words first. Note that because frequency is collected with words without nikkud, words that have the same letters but different nikkud will be assigned the same frequency.

Eng→Heb disambiguation

When two Hebrew words translate to the same English (e.g., both mean "to return"), the Eng→Heb card shows a hint to tell them apart:

• Layer 1: Automatic Part of Speech + binyan hints for words with different parts of speech (163 words)
• Layer 2: AI-refined distinct glosses for true synonyms sharing the same Part of Speech (440 words)

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What's in the conjugation deck

71 verbs listed in Appendix 1 of Coffin & Bolozky's A Reference Grammar of Modern Hebrew covering all seven binyanim, and all irregular forms

• פָּעַל (Pa'al), נִפְעַל (Nif'al), פִּעֵל (Pi'el), פֻּעַל (Pu'al)
• הִתְפַּעֵל (Hitpa'el), הִפְעִיל (Hif'il), הֻפְעַל (Huf'al)

Each verb is drilled in: present, past, future, and imperative — all persons and genders. Each card shows the English meaning and related vocabulary from the same root.

Present tense expansion: Each present tense form randomly generates a pronoun to be shown in the front of the card, so you acclimate to seeing אֲנִי, אַתָּה, and הוּא with the conjugated verb, even though they are all conjugated the same in present tense.

Modern Hebrew 2fp/3fp: Classical feminine plural future forms (e.g., תִּשְׁמֹרְנָה) are shown in parentheses, and played via audio (for the audio-included decks). the card's primary answer is the modern masculine plural form used in everyday speech.

Passive label: Pu'al and Huf'al cards show the active partner's infinitive on the front (e.g., לְבַטֵּל) followed by (סָבִיל) in smaller text, so you know you're drilling the passive conjugation.

Card order: New conjugation cards are introduced in random order (not grouped by verb).

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What's in the confusables deck

Hebrew without vowel marks is full of lookalikes. This deck groups words that are spelled identically without nikkud and asks "מה ההבדל?" (what's the difference?). The answer reveals all the words side by side with their nikkud and definitions.

Examples: דָּבָר (thing) vs. דִּבֵּר (spoke), סֵפֶר (book) vs. סָפַר (counted) vs. סַפָּר (barber).

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What's in the plurals deck

Two card directions for each noun:

• Singular → Plural: See שֻׁלְחָן → produce שֻׁלְחָנוֹת
• Plural → Singular: See שֻׁלְחָנוֹת → produce שֻׁלְחָן

Focuses on irregular plurals (the tricky ones that don't follow the rules) and common examples from each noun pattern. Cards are tagged by pattern for filtered study.

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Suggested study strategy

Start with the vocabulary deck. Anki will present the most frequent words first. Don't try to study too many cards every single day — Anki suggests 20 per day.

The conjugation cards reinforce verb forms you've already seen in vocabulary.

Use the Hebrew → English direction to build reading comprehension. Use the English → Hebrew direction to build writing and speaking recall. The sentence cloze cards test whether you can recognize words in real Hebrew text.

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About the data sources

pealim.com — A comprehensive free Modern Hebrew dictionary with nikkud, roots, conjugations, and audio. This project scrapes the public dictionary and conjugation tables.

Project Ben-Yehuda — A public-domain digital library of Hebrew literature. Example sentences come from the nikkud corpus (classic texts with full vowel marks).

Hebrew books — Additional example sentences from nikkud'd (menukad) Hebrew books, with Claude Sonnet AI-vetted quality filtering. The AI doesn't generate the sentences, it just determines whether it is a high quality sentence as an example, or not.

FrequencyWords — An open Hebrew word frequency list derived from subtitle data. Used to sort vocabulary cards from most to least common.

Coffin & Bolozky — The verb list, and known good conjugation reference for the conjugation deck comes from Appendix 1 of A Reference Grammar of Modern Hebrew (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Fixing errors

If you notice a wrong translation, missing audio, or incorrect conjugation:

• For vocabulary errors: the source is pealim.com — you can suggest corrections there. But if you think morfix has a correct translation and pealim.com does not, we may be able to encode an override.

For any other issue, whether you know how to code or not: Email me at hebrew [at] nevo [dot] engineer

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For developers

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

Quick test (20 words, no network)

python run.py --skip-scrape --skip-audio --skip-examples --test 20

Full pipeline

# Use cached dictionary (recommended after first run)
python run.py --skip-scrape

# Full rebuild including verb list extraction from PDF
python extract_verb_list.py
python run.py --skip-scrape --refresh-examples

CLI options

python run.py [options]

  --only {vocab,conjugations,confusables,plurals,complete}
                         Build only one deck type
  --skip-scrape          Use cached data/hebrew_dict.csv
  --skip-audio           Skip audio .mp3 downloads
  --skip-examples        Skip Ben Yehuda example fetching
  --skip-conjugations    Skip verb conjugation extraction
  --skip-images          Skip image fetching for concrete nouns
  --refresh-examples     Force rebuild of Ben Yehuda index
  --test N               Process only first N words

Output files

File	Description
output/hebrew_vocabulary.apkg	Vocabulary deck (text only)
output/hebrew_vocabulary_audio.apkg	Vocabulary deck + audio
output/hebrew_vocabulary_images.apkg	Vocabulary deck + images
output/hebrew_vocabulary_audio_images.apkg	Vocabulary deck + audio + images
output/hebrew_conjugations.apkg	Conjugation deck
output/hebrew_conjugations_audio.apkg	Conjugation deck + audio
output/hebrew_confusables.apkg	Confusables deck
output/hebrew_confusables_audio.apkg	Confusables deck + audio
output/hebrew_plurals.apkg	Plurals deck
output/hebrew_plurals_audio.apkg	Plurals deck + audio
output/hebrew_complete.apkg	All decks combined
output/hebrew_complete_audio.apkg	All decks combined + audio

Data files

File	Description
data/hebrew_dict_for_anki.csv	Enriched vocabulary CSV
data/conjugations.json	Verb conjugation data (71 verbs)
data/noun_plurals.json	Noun plural/construct forms
data/refined_meanings.json	AI-disambiguated meanings (440 words)
data/vetted_sentences.json	AI-vetted example sentences
data/ktiv_male_forms.json	Ktiv male (plene) forms for sentence matching
data/legacy_guid_map.json	Legacy GUIDs for study progress preservation

Pipeline overview

1. hebrew_extract.py — scrapes pealim.com dictionary
2. frequency_lookup.py — downloads/loads Hebrew frequency data
3. benyehuda.py — builds sentence index from Ben-Yehuda nikkud corpus
4. extract_verb_list.py — extracts verb list from Coffin & Bolozky PDF
5. conjugation_extract.py — fetches conjugation tables + meanings from pealim.com
6. image_fetch.py — fetches Wikipedia/Commons images for concrete nouns
7. scrape_noun_plurals.py — scrapes noun plural/construct forms from pealim.com
8. scrape_ktiv_male.py — scrapes ktiv male (plene) forms for sentence matching
9. rebuild_sentence_matches.py — matches vocab words to book sentences
10. apkg_builder.py — assembles all .apkg files
11. run.py — orchestrates all steps
12. validate_apkg.py — validates output decks

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Deck variants

Variant	Contents	Size
hebrew_vocabulary.apkg	Text + images	~15 MB
hebrew_vocabulary_audio.apkg	Text + images + audio	~80 MB
hebrew_conjugations.apkg	Text only	~1 MB
hebrew_conjugations_audio.apkg	Text + audio	~5 MB
hebrew_confusables.apkg	Text only	~1 MB
hebrew_plurals.apkg	Text only	~1 MB
hebrew_complete.apkg	Everything combined	~20 MB
hebrew_complete_audio.apkg	Everything + audio	~90 MB

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AnkiWeb

The decks will be published as shared decks on AnkiWeb (TBD).