Ivrit

[cellio]

Tonight was the last night of the ulpan (Hebrew class). I have mixed feelings about it, but there was enough that was positive that I let myself get talked into a weekly follow-on class (five sessions), after hearing who would be teaching it. :-)

I'm going to try an experiment. Occasionally I'll post short passages in Hebrew. I'll never include anything important only in Hebrew, so you're not missing anything if you don't read the language, but if you do read, I welcome corrections, replies in Hebrew, comments, etc. If you reply in Hebrew and you don't use vowels, try not to be too subtle -- I'm not too good with unpointed text yet. And my vocabulary isn't very large yet, but I have a dictionary and 501 Hebrew Verbs. Until I find a reasonable way to typeset, I'm going to take advantage of LJ's vast stores of disk space to store scanned handwriting.

Here's the first one:


(The first word on the last line is a little sloppy; it's ha-hi. That mark below it is a smudge on the paper that I couldn't quite crop out.)

Comments

[juuro.livejournal.com]

I never really learnt Hebrew. Thus, one of the things I never learnt was nikudot and dagesh, the pointings and similar indicators. Given that most of the text in Israel is unpointed, it was much simpler to get to grips with unpointed text from day one. (The only place where I have seen pointed text in street signs was Jerusalem).

[cellio]

The challenge for me is that sometimes the vowels are the only thing that change to change the meaning of a word (e.g. a verb tense), and I'm still learning those rules. Without the pointing, sometimes I know the broad word ("it's some variant on X"), but I neither know the specific nor know how to pronounce it. With total immersion I imagine you learn pretty quickly; alas, I have only limited exposure.

But hey, I'm doing better with unpointed text than I used to, so that's progress. (I used to just freeze.)

Children's books also sometimes have nikudot. I'm at a child's level, so that works for me. :-)