dictionaries and foreign languages

[cellio]

Last night I wanted to know the meaning of a Hebrew word (that I really ought to have known). When I ask Dani these kinds of questions he usually says "why don't you look it up in the dictionary?", so this time I went straight to the dictionary. Then I realized that the answer to his usual question is "because dictionaries only work if you know how to spell". The word I was looking up had four letters (that is, consonants), and three of them were ambiguous. (Hebrew has several pairs of letters that -- especially to foreigners -- are homophones.) Of the three ambiguous ones, my intuition was only correct for one of them. Oops.

Comments

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

See, now, if that's embarassing, then I feel horrible. Because that's my experience nearly every time I go near the Hebrew dictionary. I've pretty much given up in general, and I walk to the bookshelf, pick up the dictionary, hand it to Seth, and tell him what I want to look up. So anyway, don't be embarassed. After all, your intuition will never get any better if you don't keep trying. English, after all, is one of the least intuitve languages, and people learn it every day. ;)