learning blog 3

These past meetings my study of Hebrew has moved on from useful phrases and pronunciation and instead focused on basic grammar and conjugations such as conjugating adjectives and the possessive "my." These two systems seem to function as extremely simplified versions of arabic - instead of arabic's 12 or 13 conjugations of verbs, I can't quite remember which, hebrew only really has 4: male singular, female singular, many masculine, and many female. Hebrew is the first language I have studied where verb conjugations don't really extend to cover every single pronoun - for example, there are different words for you male, you female, but these are the same conjugations as he and she, since in the end you are only referring to one male or one female. Possessives are a bit more complicated, with Hebrew adding two extra forms in he and hers to bring the total to 6 endings. Adjective conjugation is similar to verbs with only 4 endings depending on gender and number.

One tricky thing that makes hebrew a little tough is the fact that gender for many words is not explicitly defined. Arabic female endings almost always end in a special letter called tar marbuta that is pronounced like a, russian usually ends in a or ya with some exceptions, but hebrew words rarely end in an a. Instead, if the word is spelled with a consonant like t or h, it is generally female, but this rule has exceptions. I haven't really gotten the hang of this yet but I don't think it is a huge deal at the moment since people still know what you are talking about if you misgender an item.

Lastly I worked on article definition. I wasn't really sure what this was at first (and neither was my language partner) but as we worked together we realized that there were rules concerning when you referred to an object by et (that) ha (the) ze (this) or none of those. Apparently we have this in english too although I never noticed, and luckily like english this doesn't change anything about the object, unlike arabic which uses different case endings depending on whether the word is defined or not.

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