Reflecting on this past semester, I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have started my learning journey with Hebrew at UR. Overall, I think I’ve done a better job at the “cultural exploring” part of that than the language learning, but I have confidence that it’ll come with time. Culturally, I was able to accomplish many things: reading through the entire Torah (in English) and gaining confidence with familiar prayers in Hebrew, attending regular shabbat service, and learning about holidays and traditions. This came with learning many new words, phrases, and customs in Hebrew to be appropriate and respectful. In my language learning specifically, I gained familiarity with the alphabet, basic grammar, months of the year and days of the week in the Hebrew calendar, colors, and numbers, as well as greetings, introductions, and other words I’ll use in my daily life.
My greatest struggle is probably reading. I’m much better at recognizing words in isolation than when combined in proper sentences, and because I only have a keyboard with an English face (and it’s not a 1 to 1 ratio sound-wise on the keyboard) I get little practice typing Hebrew. Since I mainly write it, while I can recognize words in different fonts, it definitely does slow me down, particularly for letters that look similar that I mix up more frequently in words. (Of course, I have the same problem with English, so that’s not surprising!) I haven’t reached the level of fluency to speak beyond practiced phrases, so have the least practice with it, or else I’d consider that my biggest struggle.
One of my favorite things I’ve done is learn through music. The prayer that has been the easiest for me to understand and memorize has all been because of its musical element, and it’s been amazing to listen to modern Israeli music. Even if I can’t often sing along, I truly think it’s made a difference in my pronunciation. Also, it’s just impressive! The skill of someone to be able to wrap the sound of a chet (ח) amazes me. I’ll try to continue to focus my new learning with this in mind, and work with translations of songs to help my vocabulary grow. As I memorize songs, I’ll be able to grow in my everyday vocabulary, as well as grow more familiar with modern usage of words and slang.
Interestingly, I found the article about dead languages the most helpful – since I knew Hebrew had been considered a dead language for a while, I dove into the language’s history and the revival of it as a language, starting with some basic internet articles, then a couple scholarly ones as well as several, several Wikipedia pages.
My interest has been quite piqued by modern Hebrew; originally, I was just planning on learning Biblical Hebrew, and I didn’t even know enough to know that would be a challenging idea. I want to grow my vocabulary and usage so that I can grow in skill with reading and speaking Hebrew; I’ve just expanded the scope. While practically this will likely stay on the religious side of things, my goal is still to be fluent one day.
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