Yesterday I helped my son with his homework. Below you will see the page from his English workbook that we worked on yesterday.
The book explains that Hebrew does not have an equivalent sound to the sound of 'th'. However, there are two possible sounds that replace it in Hebrew - some words that have a sound like a 'weak tav' (e.g. in Hebrew "ת'ן" and "ת'ק" for the English words thin and thick), and other words that have the sound of a "weak daled" (e.g. such as in Hebrew "ד'ס" and "ד'" for the English this and the).
And as you can see in the exercise further down one of the words is written as "פד'ר" - being "father".
in English there is no difference in how the th sounds in the words "thick", "thin" "this" and "the". Yet in Hebrew they are specifically teaching to differentiate. I have no idea how they decide which words get the "weak tav" and which get the "weak daled".
While I always thought it was just a function of the Israeli accent the way Israelis pronounce "mudder", "fodder", "dis", etc.. now I know the problem is that, for some reason, they are taught to pronounce it that way, as if it is the correct way!
When Allan Sherman wrote the song "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah", who knew that he could very well have been Israeli rather than from Chicago....
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