Chirik

Here's another vowel for you: has the sound of the i in "ski," the ee in "Greek," or the ea in "speak." Normally, to keep things simple, when we write Hebrew sounds using the English Alphabet we use the letter i for the sound of .

Now for the big question: how do we remember this one? The fact that the vowel is small, round and located under the vowel made me think of the children's story The Princess and the Pea, where the Princess sleeps on a big pile of mattresses with a pea at the very bottom. Since the word "pea" has the sound in it, let's use it for our picture. Imagine a pea under the Aleph:

Now let's try some reading practice again. You may notice that the example words are getting longer now that we're more than halfway through!

(mi) - Means who?

(li) - Means to me, or my.

(cham lee) - Means I'm hot.

I'm wrote this in Montreal on a hot summer's day, so believe me, that last example wasn't hard to think of!

(mivtach) - Means Confidence.

(mitbach) - Means kitchen.

(migbah) - Means goal. Which of course is to finish the Aleph-Bet and read Hebrew!

And here we have the next letter, Nun...