Month two down! At the beginning of February, I switched language partners from Pazit with iTalki to Maddie, a fellow student at UR. We continued to focus on the alphabet, as I hadn’t made much progress yet. Unfortunately, it was rather slow going – while a straight-forward font like Calibri gives more distinction between letters, ones like Times New Roman make it much harder for my brain to process (in the following examples: dalet vs resh vs khaf sufit). Calibri: ך ר ד Times New Roman: ך ר ד . Admittedly, I’m doing much better than I did with my letters in kindergarten (dyslexia, am I right?), but I was disappointed that my memorization of the alef bet was taking so long. It was probably mid-February until I got it perfect every time.
In the meantime, I started learning small common words that were recognizable, and stayed away from letters I was having trouble with, such as אמא “mom”, and אבא “dad”. Since I’ve changed my focus to Modern Hebrew, we’ll be focusing on words that will occur more frequently in daily life, so started working on simple things, like colors and other basic adjectives.
After I had the alef bet down, we moved onto Hebrew vowels. Vowels normally aren’t written, which is one of the challenges for pronunciation – it’s a struggle to remember what sound is there if you don’t have a clue to it. I’ve learned that the language is very contextual, and so some words can have multiple meanings, or that the slightest stress on syllable can completely change the meaning of the word. Having the vowels there is helpful for me in terms of pronunciation, but I’m leaving them off the “Hebrew” side of my notecards since I wouldn’t have them if I just read them on a page.
Once I had learned the alphabet and the vowels, it was easier to learn new words, and Maddie would give me vocab lists each week to memorize and spell by our next session. As I had with the alphabet itself, I would write down line after line of the word I was trying to memorize, as well as make flashcards. I found that rote repetition was usually the way to go for memorization. On the other hand, this meant that I usually had the spelling down for whatever I was being quizzed on, but my pronunciation usually needed work, so Maddie and I would go over that often in our sessions, enunciating every word until I got it right.
As of right now, my plan to proceed id to continue learning new words, and to start with some basic grammar. Most of what I’ve seen of Hebrew is pretty similar to English in terms of word order, but we haven’t started working on it in our lessons, so I’m excited for that. I’m going to continue to work on growing my vocabulary throughout these processes so I can speak about (or at least understand) a variety of topics.
Comments