Take a look at this sentence: שמי שון יאנג ואני מישראל. מתל אביב.

You may see a familiar word there: שמי‎. If you read my last post you would see it means… (sorry, you’ll have to read the post to find out.).

Next we’re going to talk about where you (or someone else) is from. After שמי‎, you see my name in Hebrew: שון יאנג‎, making שמי שון יאנג a simple introductory phrase – “My name is Sean Young”.

Where am I from?

In the sentence above I mention where I’m from. How? To begin with, I’m from Israel and it is written ישראל‎ in Hebrew. Can you find it? If you noticed, there is an extra letter attached to it. This is the prefix מִ‎, and it is usually attached it to the name of the place that you’re from. Therefore, מישראל‎ means “from Israel”.

So far we have most of the sentence figured out. We can now say “My name is Sean Young [ואני‎] from Israel. From [תל אביב‎].”

We have three more words to figure out, and they are very easy. In fact, looking at the two words at the end of the sentence (תל אביב) is actually the name of a city in Israel. When written with the niqud (vowels) put in, it looks like this: תֵּל־אָבִיב. If you need help with it, hover your cursor over the name and you’ll see the answer pop up in a small box. So far so good. Now we have “My name is Sean Young [ואני‎] from Israel. From Tel-Aviv.” Now to figure out that last word…

The last word actually made up of one word with an attached prefix. The word is אני‎ and it means “I”. And remember, Hebrew doesn’t have an equivalent word for “am”, “is” or “are” in the simple present tense. so it can also mean ‘I am’.

The attached prefix is written ו‎ and translated as ‘and’. So the word ואני‎ means “and I”.

Putting it all together

Now let’s look at the sentence again: שמי שון יאנג ואני מישראל. מתל אביב.. Can you figure it out? How would you pronounce it? Oh, okay, here’s the audio for this sentence:

There you have it. Now you can say where you’re from. It’s really pretty simple when you think about it. Now, I’m going to give you some exercises to to help you with this new construction along with some new vocabulary. Click here to download it.

On your information card, fill in the blanks where you see the city (עִיר) and state (מְדִינָה) you’re from. And don’t forget to say to yourself “אני מ‎” as you’re filling them out.