My reading skills have been progressing slowly in Hebrew. I do most of my reading from Facebook, reading posts that my Israeli friends posted. While I do not have a problem with recognizing letters, I have a problem with pronunciation. Vowel sounds are usually added as dots below the letters. However, these vowel sounds are not used by experienced Hebrew speakers because they know the words already. Therefore, I have a problem knowing whether the letter mem "m" is pronounced as "ma", "me", "mi", "mo", or "moo" in a word. In addition, some letters have more than one way to pronounce. For example, both letters khet and khaf can be pronounced as "k" or "kh"; bet can be pronounced as "b" or "v"; shin can be pronounced as "s" or "sh". The only way to learn how to recognize these vowels and different letter sounds is through experience and reading.
I have been working with my language partner on reading verbs in the different tenses and knowing what vowels are associated with them without writing the dots down. In addition, I will borrow a book from the Global Studio to read in my own time and then read to my language partner. These methods should help me reach my goal to be able to read and understand simple Hebrew writing. Maybe I will try to find children books with images to help me understand the big picture in what I am reading.
Overall I learned many words. I cannot remember the exact number, but I know it is a lot because I have been formulating sentences without looking up the words in a dictionary. It might be helpful that many words are shared in Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew.
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I also have trouble reading. My problem is confounded today becasue I learned about the possessive -e that is added to the end of nouns. My language partner helped me pronounce words because the vowels that I learned called "short or hidden vowels" arent written everytime. The four accent markers are very helpful, but mylanguage partner pronounces things differently than I would. She said a word was arabic today which made it sound different from its spelling. I found a good website that translates for me, but the words aren't on my vocabulary list. Whenever I don't know a word I should put it in my list to learn.