Hebrew Alphabet

 

Note the five letters than may end a word. One, FEH, does not seem to appear as a syllable-initial sound. The kaki-jun 書き順 (writing direction) is kind of decipherable, but it will probably need to be investigated in a video or something soon. I tried writing them all, including the cursive, and it seemed to go okay. Comparing the printed and cursive letters gives a clue as to the kaki-jun. 

One yikes is that the alphabet seems to be a kind of syllabary, with YOD being a kind of semi-letter, and a related yikes is that there seem to be duplications of initial sounds, notably K, e.g., KAF, KHET, and QOF, as well as TET, TAV, and perhaps TSADI, not to mention ALEPH and AYIN. In Japanese (and Korean) you'd see five letters starting with K, T, or A, whereas in Hebrew there may be more "loading" on some sounds than on others. On the Japanese syllabary again, I noticed that the examples for  ZAYIN and SAMEKH are, respectively "Zer" (bouquet) and "Seret" (movie). I noticed that the ZAYIN has the lower double-dot diacritical, while the SAMEKH has the lower triple-dot one, suggesting that these two letters do not have the same "default" vowel expression, and further, that they each reach the "e" vowel potential by different routes, implying that the diacriticals are context-based, i.e., double-dot does not mean "eh" nor does triple-dot, but only produces the same vowel, if indeed it is the same vowel in "Zer" and "Seret". Anyway, it seems there may be a lot to unpack here.