And to complicate the situation, you have modern Hebrew and biblical Hebrew. I have mostly focused on biblical Hebrew, so I could not even ask for a cookie in modern Hebrew. And as everyone knows, being able to ask for cookies is vital to survival in any language.
I don’t want to give you the idea that Hebrew is impossible to learn. It’s not. As a matter of fact, it is rather friendly once you get past the completely different alphabet. Hebrew is pronounced phonetically and that is very helpful. This means you can successfully pronounce any number of words that you don’t have any idea the meanings of. I also don’t want you to get the impression that I don’t like Hebrew. I LOVE Hebrew for many incoherent spiritual reasons that I won’t go into now. So I am highly motivated to learn it, I just think I am getting a bit long in the tooth for the whole language thing to go well.
However, I keep plugging away. At this point I understand about one word in 10 when I hear it read aloud. That’s helpful when keeping up in the prayer book at synagogue. I am only nine tenths of a step off ! But I am generally on the right page.
Today I was studying with a Hebrew computer program called Rosetta Stone. There was hardly a biblical word in sight so I was a bit at sea. I mean “airplane” and “car” were just not in the original text you know what I mean ? The whole thing makes me want to go back to the tower of Babel with a VERY large backpack full of explosives and nip that mistake right in the bud. What WERE those people thinking? What a mess they left us with. All these different languages. Even the people at the UN look silly with plastic ears on trying to understand each other. (Maybe that’s what is the matter with those Frenchmen, they don’t understand Texican.)
But I suppose I should be grateful that my native language is English, as I have heard that it is a nightmare to learn it if you weren’t raised with it. I can just imagine. We have hundreds of words that sound alike that mean completely different things and our spelling and pronunciation are. . . well, demented is the only word that comes to mind.
SO, you would think that having mastered this most convoluted of languages, I could tackle Hebrew with some sense of calm and assurance. No such luck. But I keep trying, because of it’s beauty and mystery.
And maybe one day, if I study hard and don’t give up, I will be able to ask for cookies in Jerusalem.