About us
A method born from a magazine, on a plane
Ulpan Story grew out of a frustration that many people who learned Hebrew at Jewish school or in an ulpan will recognise. You can read. You know the letters, the vowels, some roots, prayers, everyday phrases. And yet, in front of a real text, you read… without understanding.
Two turning points
The first came during two talks given in Hebrew. Without context, impossible to follow. With context (the topic, the speaker, what was at stake), you follow, you guess, you understand far more than you thought you could.
The second came on a flight to Israel. The airline's magazine was split in two: fifty pages in Hebrew, without nikud, then fifty pages in English. We did the exercise: read the Hebrew, check the English, go back to the Hebrew. It worked. But what an effort, flicking back and forth between the two halves of the magazine.
With context, you understand. Without it, you drift away.
From idea to book
The idea came straight away: put the Hebrew and its translation on facing pages, and choose stories that make you want to read to the end.
The fading support came next. When you read with a mirror page, your eyes wander: you leave a sentence in Hebrew, land on another one in English, and lose the thread. So the translation steps back little by little. It fills with gaps, gives way to the vocabulary, then disappears, so your eyes stay on the Hebrew.
And the stories had to be long. To absorb vocabulary, you need to meet it again and again until it feels familiar. A continuous story does that; ten short texts of ten lines each do not.
Roots, an often forgotten key
Many of our readers, like us, learned Hebrew early: the letters, the vowels, the roots, the shorashim. That background is precious, and often left unused.
Our books put it to work. Every new word is linked to its root, so readers work it out instead of memorising it.
What we believe
- 1
Context brings understanding
Working things out is a natural ability. A reader who follows a story guesses far more words than they realise.
- 2
A true story gets read to the end
Nobody abandons a spy in Damascus in chapter three. Wanting to know what happens next does the rest.
- 3
Every book, a new world of words
Each story brings its own vocabulary field: espionage and the army with Eli Cohen, other worlds with the books that follow. Book after book, your vocabulary grows instead of going round in circles.
- 4
Reading like an Israeli means reading without vowels
That is the goal of every book: to finish on everyday Hebrew, the Hebrew of newspapers, street signs and messages.
Who it is for
For people who can already read Hebrew and want to understand it at last. For those preparing their aliyah, or who have already made it. For everyone who loves this language and wants to find their way back to it.
Ulpan Story started as a project for the people close to us. They loved it, and pushed us to turn it into a collection.