Monthly Lang. Journal 1

[Jacob Goldfarb]

During the beginning of my learning endeavors my Language Partner and I primarily focused on gaining more knowledge about the Hebrew alphabet. His goal for me was to understand how to read, write, and pronounce each letter of the language so that I could eventually be able to form sentences of my own. We started off extremely basic, simply trying to sing the alef bet Het song that he introduced me to. This song was very helpful because it was essentially the abcs for English. It was very catchy and he even referred me to an app that would help me memorize the song in a fun way. My language partner was hoping that a few sessions in I would be fully familiar with the alphabet and would be able to move on to actually practice the language. I am happy that I was actually able to reach this goal through practice on my own that primarily revolved around repetition and writing the letters over and over. I also took on the alphabet from a speaking perspective. I focused on saying the sounds of each letter over and over so that I was going to be able to properly pronounce words when I got there. This strategy was very successful because while speaking the letters out loud I was able to become more familiar to identifying which letter was which when they were spoken out loud for me to listen to. One part of learning the alphabet that was quite frustrating was how close some of the letters look to each other. For example, the letters He and Chet are nearly identical except for a small gap in how they are written. These subtle differences were extremely frustrating a lot of the time because it is hard having to be aware of such minute differences in a language when you are first starting out. For example, in English when I was learning the alphabet as a child there was no way to mix any of the letters up because they all look distinct. Learning the Hebrew alphabet was much more challenging because it felt not only was I memorizing a foreign alphabet but I was also simultaneously having to stay focused on these small details. Nevertheless, the fact that it is a harder alphabet to read and write, it made it more satisfying to actually learn and become familiar with. I was not so successful in writing the alphabet for the first time given these minute differences. This being said, my instructor really was incredibly assistive. Whenever I would mess up he say good job and then nicely correct me. This was a great way to help me learn because even though I did not get it exactly right, I was still motivated to keep on learning. When it came to saying the letters I also was often times not successful. I had a tendency to add a bit of an American accent, to the point where it changed the whole sounding of the letter. This was not good because later when I would be forming words, this kind of accent would make it hard for other Hebrew speakers to interpret what I was saying. Overall, I had a great time learning and applying the alphabet.