Bikermom wrote: So does that mean Hebrew uses many consonants and few vowel sounds?

I don't know about Hebrew, but in Literary Modern (standard) Arabic only the consonant sounds are normally written for any word. Of course there are three vowel sounds /a/, /i/, /u/, but they are only written into words when they are part of the "three-letter" word-root, or lengthened through grammatical changes. The regular vowel forms, which are part of any Arabic word, can be signalled by little written marks either above or beneath the consonant that they follow, but this is optional. To make matters more complicated, the vowel-structure of a word helps you determine its form and function, so it carries important grammatical and lexical information.

Needless to say, reading Arabic correctly with no vowels available requires a good amount of proficiency in the language. The extreme regularity of Arabic grammatical rules means that once you know them, you cannot mistake one word for another, and you know perfectly what vowels it contains along with the visible consonants. Until you reach that level of skill, it is all a rather hit-and-miss affair.