What works best for me has been to create and use inserts with the translitterated texts (and also recordings of various prayers) so that I have almost memorized many prayers, and with time I am able to throw away the inserts. My goal is to be able to use the siddur in hebrew without a crutch, and I am making decent progress so far. So much for the keva.

Helping a lot with both the Hebrew and with kavanah has been a website called http://www.kakatuv.com. There the author offers interlinear texts Hebrew/translitteration/literal English translations of each word. I can use both the literal translations (with grammar and usage notes) and the translations in my siddur in my quest to understand the big picture.

Have also just discovered buildaprayer.org, where you can make and print your own siddur with or without translitteration.

Keep up the good work, Dr. Hoffman. I have started to follow your CSS feed, and to watch your youtube stuff. Very interesting stuff. I come from a languages/linguistics background myself, but not Semitic languages.

As you rightly point out, sooner or later people figure out that you don’t need to be able to decode the Hebrew to learn prayers or even a Torah portion: just get a recording and memorize. But if you follow those folks for a few years, many of them discover in Torah study that decoding is only that: decoding. It isn’t “real Hebrew” either. Being able to pronounce the words is a nice beginning, but it won’t enrich Torah study by much. However, learning what a shoresh is and how it works can open up an old familiar portion in a whole new way.

Last night, as part of a discussion of the verb l’hiyot I explained to my adult students why it is that “Eternal” is my preferred way to translate the name of God. We talked about the verb “to be” and how that fits the Name, then suddenly one student sat bolt upright, and almost shouted, “OH!” then in a softer voice, “THIS is why I want to learn Hebrew. I want to UNDERSTAND.”