The past two weeks have focused on grammatical situations involving accusative and nominative sentences. Ironically, I have no idea what those two things mean in English, and know them purely by examples given in Russian, which made it tough to describe to my language partner what exactly I was interested in learning. We learned new words such as shey, ze, ha, et, which all seem to mean this/that/definition depending on the context. My partner struggled a lot with finding an english counterpart to each of these words, and I don't blame her. One of the most interesting things that I have found about learning a foreign language is how much it shows you how little you understand your mother tongue. I think learning a language definitely has a progression from perfect understanding of what you are studying to just knowing how to say things without thinking about it, like how a native speaker learns. I remember a couple years ago I could probably explain what exactly the chinese word 了 means but know I would really have to think hard about how to explain it, instead I just use it when it sounds right. Same with languages that have case/gender endings like Russian. The progression from actively thinking about a verb's declension to just saying what you think is right is really important and I think defines what is almost paradoxically simultaneous progression and regression.
This weekend I plan on starting to learn the Hebrew Aleph-bet. The reason I waited so long was I didn't want to confuse it with the arabic alphabet that I was learning at the beginning of the semester. Also it isn't something that is as important to me as proper pronunciation and fluidity, and not something that I really need to practice with my language partner. I anticipate it being somewhere in the middle in terms of difficulty between cyrillic and arabic.
Comments