Monthly Lang. Journal 3

[Jacob Goldfarb]

Next, we moved on to more applicable learning which I was really excited for because one of my goals for learning Hebrew was learning info that I could use in the real world. We once again focused on reading short sentences and becoming more fluid in my interpretation of Hebrew words and listening.  We began by learning basic numbers so I would be able to count in Hebrew. We focused on learning 1-10,000 because the way Hebrew numbers work is that once 1-10 is mastered the rest are much easier to learn as well. 1-10, echad, shtaim, shalosh, arba, etc. were very easy because it was simple memorization. The 10’s were harder because it required more thinking and this made saying bigger numbers much more challenging but nevertheless I eventually was able to say numbers well through consistent practice. Next to help my reading and greater interpretation of Hebrew as a whole we decided it would be good to move onto male and female pronouns. I was also excited for this part off my learning because I would be adding additional functionality to my arsenal of Hebrew. Now I would be able to address people and better describe situations when speaking in Hebrew. It was really cool to see this progression real time in such a short amount of time. I went from learning the alphabet to being able to describe a situation like someone who fluently speaks the language and that was really cool to see. We first discussed common indicators at the end of a word that would make the word feminine. These were ah, eet, oot, et, ot, and at. At first it was kind of hard because it was tough to actually apply these endings to words that I had just learned. Through practice and continuous exposure however, I was able to really start applying this knowledge quickly. We would use exercises like looking at a group of words and deciding whether they were masculine or feminine using the endings that were assigned. This whole experience was pretty gratifying overall because I understood these concepts much better and quicker than the past content we had studied. It seemed like as I became more settled in to what I was learning I was picking up and retaining information much quicker. I also noticed some interesting differences between Hebrew and English that my instructor pointed out. There is a different use of applying masculinity and femininity to words in Hebrew than English. Some words have a masculine ending even though they are not affiliated with the male gender and this applied vice versa as well which is something I had to be aware of when learning. I was pretty excited where I got up to as far as my overall proficiency with the language at this point. I was one step closer to being more fluent and being able to use Hebrew like a native speaker even though I obviously had and have a long way to go until I am objectively fluent. This part of my language learning endeavor was fun and interesting.