Idan Srur

HEMY is an online Hebrew school. You learn with a native Israeli teacher, one on one, over video. Between lessons you keep going on your own: vocabulary games, a free grammar course, stories, and voice conversations with an AI that answers in Hebrew, in real time.

Everything lives in one place, on the web and in the app: your lessons, your practice and your progress.

HEMY has been live since 2024. I built it on my own, from the first idea to production. So, a quick introduction.

A full-stack and mobile developer, based in Herzliya, Israel.

Before code there was education: a degree in education and criminology, and years of working with teenagers, in groups and one on one. I still do, alongside development, mentoring teens at a boarding school.

I learned development by building. React, React Native, Next.js, Supabase, and everything it takes to put a product live and keep it there. HEMY was the first platform I built end to end. Others followed, and I'm still learning.

What connects those two worlds, education and code, is exactly what HEMY does.

Working with teenagers, I kept seeing the same thing. The ones who moved forward weren't necessarily the ones with the best material. They were the ones who had someone: someone who knew them, noticed when they got stuck, and adjusted the path.

When I started developing, I saw the other side. Technology can do what a teacher can't: be there at ten at night, repeat the same exercise five times without getting tired, remember exactly where you stopped.

With Hebrew, I saw that the two barely meet. There are excellent teachers, but between lessons the learner is left alone with worksheets. There are apps, but nobody in them knows you, and there's nobody to talk to.

Most people learning Hebrew don't have a vocabulary problem. They have nobody to talk to. In writing there's always a gap: you can think, look up a word, delete. In speech there's no gap. You either say it or you don't.

So I built HEMY. First to connect learners with teachers. Then, layer by layer, everything needed so that learning doesn't stop when the lesson ends.

I don't believe AI replaces a teacher. I also don't believe one lesson a week is enough.

A teacher gives what technology can't: a real conversation, a plan built around you, someone who notices. Technology gives what a teacher can't: it's there at any hour, with no embarrassment and nobody waiting. A place to fail quietly.

And at the next lesson, your teacher gets a student who already spoke Hebrew this week, not just wrote it.

Something I learned along the way: when you build a learning tool with AI, the hard part isn't the technology. It's the pedagogy. When to wait for a student who's thinking. What to do when they switch to English (answer in Hebrew, more simply, and bring them back). How to end every turn with a question, so they have something to answer. That's what a good teacher does, and that's what I'm trying to build.

My goal is simple: to help every learner in their own way, and to build exactly the tools they need to learn better.

HEMY is still young, and I'm still building it every day. There are things to fix, and I know exactly which. If you tried something and it was missing, or it didn't work, I want to hear about it. That's what helps me build it right.

You can reach me here:

Or by email: office@hemy-hebrew.com