Learning blog 2

[Chester Hunter]

Now that I have met with my language partner a couple of times I can speak with much more confidence about the things I am doing right and the things that I am doing (very) wrong. Overall I am happy with the progress I have made, but I do feel like there are limitations in language self-study. Without being in a classroom and meeting almost every day, it is difficult to remember to study Hebrew and to retain new vocabulary. Luckily, Hebrew is not a particularly difficult language and my sessions with my partner are fruitful enough for me to have made significant progress, especially in the realm of pronunciation. My "ch" sounds much more natural and words like aruchat which I previously struggled a lot with have become much easier. My partner didn't unfortunately have any wise advice about how to pronounce the r, which I still struggle with. Thankfully it is not an incredibly common letter and mispronouncing it, according to my partner, makes me sounds foreign rather than flat out wrong. I have also learned more slang and useful phrases like slicha (excuse me), ma ko re (whats good), and yafa (cutie). The last one actually came from my dad, but my partner got quite a kick out of being called that. I also learned the word metzekoah, which literally translates to half-power, but is slang for so-so. It was interesting calling my dad and saying these new words so he could see how much the language has changed since he lived in Israel over 30 years ago. So far the most impressive activity I have been able to do is pretend I am at a restaurant and order food for me and my partner, who also happens to be the waiter. Through this activity I have learned some cultural particularities that I might not have gotten from reading a textbook. I knew the word for hurry up (maher) previously, but I would never have said that when ordering, because in America and especially in the south that would be seen astonishingly rude. But apparently that is said in Israel quite often, occasionally paired with benzonah (son of a *****) although I believe that is reserved more for traffic situations. Either way, this method of learning primarily from native speaker who has never taught a language before means that adapting to cultural differences and linguistic differences goes hand in hand, and I think so far it has been working out well. In the coming weeks I hope to continue work on pronunciation as well as begin to learn more about the grammatical structure of Hebrew as well as male/female conjugations, since part of the activity involved using verbs such as I want and I eat. Looking ahead, over fall break when I have more time to study I want to begin on the alphabet so I can stop using the crutch of a latin alphabet. The timing for that is on purpose as my Arabic class has mostly finished the alphabet and diacritic lessons and I didn't want to learn them at the same time. One of the things I look at daily that makes me proud and motivated is how many different keyboards I have downloaded on my phone... 6! with that get used often. I would definitely recommend downloading the keyboard of your target language even if you don't really use it. It is at least cool to look at!