How well did you achieve your goals? What were the stumbling blocks you encountered? How were you able to overcome them? What was most/least interesting to you? What would you like to do next?
Learning the alphabet was relatively easy. I did not have a problem with the pronunciation of the letters at all. I just needed to write them down several time to memorize what they look like. There are certain sounds that can be made by more than one letter, and there are also letters that can be pronounced in more than one way. Unfortunately, most of the time there is no way to tell which pronunciation to use. It only comes with experience.
As far as greetings and farewells, I learned a few words that are most popular among the younger generations in Israel. I made my first artifact using my knowledge from this task, which was the artifact with the two babies meeting and greeting each other. This is my favorite artifact.
Introducing myself and my family was one of my favorite tasks. I was very excited about making the video to document it. The challenging part with this task and the artifact was forming the sentences on my own. I had to use the online dictionary to search for some verbs, while my language partner helped me learn the family words.
Learning the numbers was slightly challenging only because the masculine/feminine is reversed in comparison to other words. While you usually add the ending “-a” to refer to feminine adjectives, with numbers it is the opposite. I recited the numbers to myself at least once a day, in both the masculine and feminine way. Learning how to tell the time was easy since I only learned how to say “quarter past”, “quarter till”, and “half past”.
Learning grammar was a secondary task that replaced my original task about soccer. This task was especially challenging because of the different conjugation per pronoun. I still did not completely master the different tenses, especially the future tense. I feel a lot more comfortable about it now since I started reading the book I borrowed from the global studio and that helped me a lot. My language partner helped me translate while I tried to recognize the verb tenses based on the conjugation.
I did not enjoy learning my other tasks much. I only learned them because I wanted to finish my ten learning tasks. I believe that the reason behind this is once I started reading from the book, I realized that I enjoy reading and translating more than learning tasks. This became an issue since I lost interest in learning these tasks. My least favorite of those tasks was learning how to use the phone, especially because I do not think I will ever need to make a phone call in Hebrew. This was a big roadblock in my way of learning. I had to rethink my way of learning because I was no longer curious about learning those tasks. I started to ask my language partner to give me words related to the task, and as part of my homework I would make sentences based on those words. This way I was able to learn those tasks by engaging my interest in grammar and verb conjugation.
I will take one or two gap years before I go back to graduate school. In those years I will continue learning Hebrew by reading and translating more. I may also use a computer program to help me with the pronunciation. I will devote more time towards memorizing words because I believe that my vocabulary should have been much better at the end of the semester.
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