This week we focused on improving fluency and understanding basic nikkud. Nikkud are diacritical marks that denote how a vowel is supposed to be pronounced. א this letter is "a" but as we know in english, there are many different ways to say the vowel. In english there are so many exceptions that you really just have to know the word to know exactly how it is pronounced, but Hebrew is more regular and so nikkud is a system to allow people to confidently pronounce unfamiliar words correctly.
Originally I had discussed with my language partner about if I really wanted to learn nikkud or not. My reasoning was that it isn't really a natural way to learn it, since it is tailored to foreigners who are learning hebrew as a second language. I figured that there wasn't really much of a point, because if I read something in Hebrew, unless its a religious text or a text specifically formatted for hebrew learners, it probably wouldn't have nikkud at all, so why learn something that I won't really use that often? But my language partner said that I should probably learn it anyway, since the idea is to have good pronunciation when you look up a new word, like how in English dictionaries there are phonetic markings that tell you how a word is pronounced (although truth be told I have never used these.) So I decided to at least familiarize myself with the most basic nikkud.
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