Vowels and the Masoretes
The Masoretes added niqqud so a purely consonantal Bible could be read with a stable tradition.
Who pointed the text
Masoretic scholars, especially the Tiberian school, recorded vowels, stress, and chant. The Leningrad Codex (dated 1008/1009 CE in its colophon) is the base of common scholarly editions such as BHS. The Aleppo Codex is another famous Masoretic witness, incomplete since the twentieth century.
The main vowel signs
Patah and qamatz, tzere and segol, hiriq, holam, qubutz and shuruq, plus sheva and the hataf vowels under gutturals. Sheva can be silent or sounded; printed grammars disagree at the edges. When a pointing is uncertain in this module, the word is left unvowelled.
qamatz (vowel sign / the word "he grasped")
patah
tzere
sheva
What niqqud is not
Vowel points are a medieval reading layer on an older consonantal text. Dead Sea copies and a Torah scroll have no niqqud. Learning with points first is normal; dropping them later is the same skill soferim already assume.
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Cantillation marks
Te'amim mark stress, pause, and melody. They also show how a verse is parsed.
Ketiv and qere
The written consonants (ketiv) and the reading tradition (qere) sometimes disagree. Both are in the Masoretic notes.
The alphabet then and now
Twenty-two consonants, five final forms, and a script that shifted from paleo-Hebrew to the square letters used today.