I started to learn Hebrew again. This is my second try. Last time I gave it up because there was too much going on when my parents were visiting.
MM decided this time he would teach me how to read first--the way he learned it as a kid growing up in Britain. Make sense--I remember last time I pulled quite a few hair off when MM explaining to me grammatical rules, which brought all my German-learning nightmare back.
We started on Dec 23 and today is 26, and on average we probably spent two hours on each day. At this point I can "more or less read Hebrew," to use MM's words. That is, if he shows me a Hebrew words (with vowels explicitly written, of course), I can read it out loud (and it sounds like Hebrew being read most of the times) even though I don't know what it means.
However the more syllables the word has, the longer it takes me. So practice, practice and practice is the next on the agenda...then it is the seemingly impossible task of reading without vowels! I wonder if anybody did a study on how native Hebrew speakers perform in playing crosswords; my guess is that they must be doing extremely well compared to others.
2 comments:
Keep it up! Hebrew is in fact an extremely logical language with few exceptions to the rules. That's what happens when nobody really uses a language for 2000 years....
In order to read without vowels you first need to understand but then it becomes really easy because as I said there are a few rules and not many exceptions. Now my children learn English, I can't understand how anyone can learn such a complicated language with so many irregularities and such horrible spelling.
I would say that English and Hebrew are about as hard as each other. Writing English correctly is a bit like the difficulty of reading Hebrew without vowels. English has irregular verbs but Hebrew has all those Binyanim and making plurals etc. in Hebrew isn't as simple as adding an s in English because not only do you add -im or -ot but the vowels change subtly too.
I think Japanese is likely the hardest major language (If you already read Chinese then it might not be harder than Hebrew :)).
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