cellio | Hebrew class

In preparation for the ulpan next month, the instructor invited me to join the current Hebrew class for the last few sessions. I've been to two classes so far. Of the six students, I judge myself to be second-most advanced, and I recognize the material so I'm pretty sure this is the same level that I was in several years ago. It's possible that I should be up one level, but I'm not sure.

It's a frustrating blend of "this is too easy" and "WTF?". I'm not sure how much of that is modern versus biblical, how much is speaking versus reading, and how much is teaching style.

I appear to have a somewhat methodical mind, and the biblical-Hebrew textbook I'm working with plays well to that. Here's a rule, let's apply it for a while, ok now there are some exceptions, now here's a variation... It's not completely front-loaded with rules; a previous book was more like that and I got overwhelmed, craving applications. This book does a good job of giving me almost exactly as much structure as I need, neither making me guess nor asking me to memorize a tome before reading my first text.

So, the conversational-Hebrew class... is different. It's structured around dialogues: Sarah buying stuff at the grocery store, the mailman delivering a package, etc. The teacher talks through the dialogue, pointing to things in a picture of the scene and gesturing appropriately to connect the spoken words with their meanings. Good so far. You can tell she's been reciting these particular dialogues for a gazillion years. Then she has us repeat it phrase by phrase, over and over. She has us read it to each other (each taking one half of the conversation) (yay, written text!). She asks simple questions in Hebrew about the dialogue (what did Sarah buy, did the mailman deliver a package, etc). Ok in principle, but it's really all pattern-matching; we could answer the questions just by recognizing the part of the dialogue they come from and quoting, and I suspect that's intentional. So there must be an education-design reason for what seems to this student to be unhelpful.

There are substitution drills (and we're into written text by now), where the text gives a sentence and then one word to substitute into it, for which you may have to change words. (For example, "Sarah shotah yayin" + Moshe -> "Moshe shoteh yayin".) These sentences are three or four words long -- subject, verb, object, maybe negation. There are written questions with, again, a lot of repetition -- but writing practice is good (and there are a couple letters I have trouble remembering in script, so that helps).

So in all of this, the rules evolve, ever so slowly. By this point in the course -- most of the way through the second-level class -- we know that present-tense verbs follow the pattern xoxeh for masculine subjects and xoxah for feminine subjects. No plurals, no other binyanim (and I don't know which this is either -- pa'al?), nothing irregular like drop-letter verbs. We know how to feminize masculine nouns (yelid -> yaldah) and adjectives (tov -> tovah), though there seems to be some unexplained variation in vowels (why is it yaldah instead of yeldah and does that generalize?). Having taught that, the book might have then said "and here's how you do plurals", for instance, because that's not hard, but it doesn't. I assume it'll emerge in a much later dialogue, but not in this semester.

I said I was having "WTF?" moments. Part of this is pure vocabulary; biblical Hebrew doesn't spend much time on groceries and mailmen and packages. Part of it is processing vocabulary (initially) aurally and not visually; I don't know why that's hard, but I better get used to it because, well, conversation. But I sometimes have to ask her to repeat words more slowly that I know, darn it. (Sometimes I don't know them, but sometimes I do.) A little of it is differences in both vocabulary and usage between biblical and modern Hebrew.

Here's an example of a mysterious vocabulary difference; maybe someone can clue me in. In biblical Hebrew (and, I believe, Dani's understanding of modern Hebrew, though I haven't asked him this directly), "l-" (derived from "el") means "to" or "for". There is also "shel" in modern Hebrew; "kosher l'pesach" and "kosher shel pesach" both mean "kosher for Pesach", and I've seen both on product packaging. When I used "l-" to mean "for" tonight, the instructor corrected me with (this is what I heard) "shivil". (Pronoun modifiers might apply; she said "for me" is "shivli".) I have never heard that word before; when I asked her about it she just said "that's the word". (I didn't think to ask about "shel".) Huh, ok, shrug. Another example: "but" is "ach" in biblical Hebrew and "aval" in modern; easy enough to memorize, but it's another little thing to trip one up.

Structurally, biblical Hebrew often leaves out subjects because they're inferred from the gender/number of the verb, and often puts the verb first and then the subject. She is teaching us to be meticulous about (1) subject then verb and (2) explicit subjects. If the shopkeeper just asked you what you want, you still say "ani rotzah (object)", not just "rotzah (object)". Yes, technically it's ambiguous if there's any other woman in sight (rotzah being feminine), but he just asked me a direct question, yes? Why would I respond by saying that that lady over there wants something? Again, it's no problem to do it, but I have to train those instincts. (Do Israelis really talk that way, or is this simplification because it's a beginning class?)

Maybe I'm being challenged by changing two aspects at once, biblical/modern and written/spoken. If this were spoken biblical Hebrew or written modern Hebrew, I'd almost certainly be ready for a more-advanced class. As it is, while the pace can be frustratingly slow and I want the class to fill in the extra bits that are being omitted, I suspect this is the class I belong with, at least through the ulpan.

But I'm still on the lookout for better ways to learn modern Hebrew.

Monica

Hebrew class

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