Our readings and discussion in class the other day was very thought provoking. It is interesting and (unfortunately) unique thinking about the best way to learn something as a student. Our educational system is very controlled and does not leave a lot of room for the students to make decisions about the best way to approach learning. Being able to make my own learning decisions for this class is so out of the ordinary for me that I am overwhelmed and feel it is hard to get started since the options are endless.
Reading these articles, discussing with Professor Grove, and hearing what my fellow students are doing is helping me figure out my own path I want to take. I want to incorporate all of the information I am learning from the articles to make my learning experience as effective as possible.
A tactic we discussed the other day was to place meaning on all of the words, you will never remember something if it has no meaning to you or meaning in context. This makes me want to learn words that will be useful for what I want to be able to say in Hebrew. I will probably try to aim my Hebrew knowledge towards conversational and touristy Hebrew before moving on to more complicated things.
Another thing we talked about was how to remember words and their spellings. Writing things down is very helpful for me so I will try to do some kinesthetic exercises. Using flash cards is also usually effective but if I am memorizing something without meaning I will not remember it in the long term. I think studying flashcards is useful for a quiz but I forget them right after I take the quiz. In my opinion, flashcards can actually take meaning out of the words you are learning because instead of the goal being to learn a language it turns into memorizing words as quickly as possible; you forget the overarching goal and focus on the smaller tasks which in this case is memorizing the words. Maybe I can combine flashcards with something else to help the words stick in my memory or I can make all of my memorization cumulative.
Something else I am debating is if learning conversational Hebrew would coincide with learning Hebrew from the Torah. This is something I might want to discuss with my rabbi and figure out if I have time for both.
Comments