One of my favorite Instagram pages belongs to cartoonist and animator Nadav Nachmany, who posts short comics on his page daily. The comics use everyday spoken Hebrew, including healthy doses of slang, and always make me smile or laugh.

I wanted to create a blog post based on one of his recent comics that I saw, because it ties so well into my video on the imperative form in Hebrew. The imperative, or command form in Hebrew – called tsivui ציווי – is used to tell someone to do something. There are technically four forms: singular masculine and feminine, and plural masculine and feminine, but the plural feminine is rarely used. The video below (it’s only 3 mins long – watch it before continuing!) talks about the three forms that are used: masculine singular, feminine singular, and plural, which is used for both genders. 

This comic, called The Complete Guide to Small Talk, uses several imperative verbs to break down – with lots of humor, of course – how to engage in the super awkward exercise (for introverts like me!) of engaging in small talk. I translated the steps from each comic frame below; scroll through the slides to read them all.

Go through the slides as often as you need to. Once you’re comfortable with what you’ve learned, try out the exercise below, which calls for you to click on all of the imperative verbs from the guide. Behatslachah בהצלחה – good luck!

Here’s one more exercise, and again you don’t have to do it today (or you can come back and do it as often as you’d like). Here you’ll need to arrange the sentences so they’re in the order of how the steps were presented; just click the sentence you want.

I hope you enjoyed these exercises, my imperatives video, and of course Nadav Nachmany’s work, and learned at least one new thing that you didn’t know before.

Please let me know in the comments if you’d like more interactive blog posts like this – and feel free to share your thoughts in general!

Until next time,