It has been several months since my initial post and my current date of departure is now May 1st. I had hoped in this long interim to have mastered the Hebrew language at least to the point of being able to write a few coherent sentences. Instead I’d like to present a short narrative of why I think the language sucks.
Just to be clear, I did try my best. Every time I went for a walk, I listened to my 6 CD Pimsleur Learning System. (well maybe not every time) Then I took 12 one night a week classes and finally, then I went to Friday night services and read all the prayers in Hebrew even when the rest of the congregation was following along in English. What do I have to show for all this work? Well, I can say hello, goodbye and peace. I can also say “besader” which means “OK.” I know how to say “what” (ma), “where” (afo), and thanks (toda). I also know “see you later” (lahetraout), but only because it’s part of a song I can’t seem to get out of my head. After all this time and all this work, I keep asking myself, where did I go wrong and here is the answer(s) I came up with.
First of all, I was shocked to learn that Modern Hebrew was invented by Eliezar Ben Yehuda in the early 1900’s and did not really come into its own until after 1948. The Israeli founding fathers/mothers had a dilemma, namely what language should a good Israeli Jew speak. Arabic, the predominate language of Palestine was rejected for “obvious” reasons, after all if Jews and Arabs spoke the same language, how would you tell people apart. There, of course, was English which was discarded as too colonialist, German which was too Nazi, and Yiddish which was too old world. That left Hebrew which almost nobody spoke in the old country (Eastern Europe), certainly not in the Diaspora and hardly in Palestine. So the great insight of Yehuda and his supporters was to come up with Hebrew and basically create a following from scratch. The minute I heard this explanation in my first day at Hebrew school I felt deceived and ripped off. I was no longer learning a vibrant language which was 5,000 years old, but merely following some artificial Zionist invention created within my own lifetime. Honestly, I never overcame that barrier.
As for the language itself, there are so many levels of difficulty, it’s hard to know where to begin. Most obvious is that the alphabet is different and the words move from right to left. In the class I took about half of the students were theology majors who were learning Hebrew to read the Bible in its original form., which seems like a silly reason, but who am I to judge. For them the alphabet was tough, but for me, it only took about a week or so before my 5 years of Hebrew school at the age of 8 caught me up to speed. But, just as I was getting the hang of the printed letters, the teacher introduced the script form. Not only is this a completely different set of letters, but it is written so quickly that everything looks like a doctor’s prescription form. To add one more level of complexity, in modern practice all the vowel sounds, the little dots and dashes that give the words distinctive sounds, are dropped off. The effect is to force the reader to guess at the meaning and sound of words based on his previous knowledge of what the word looked like before all the vowels were dropped off.
Putting all that behind a tov yelid (good student) like myself, one gets into the real mechanics of the language. Most words are either male or female and there seems to be no rules for which are which. We are told that it is mildly offensive to confuse the gender orientation of words. After numerous classes it finally occurred to me that every verb I used was in the present tense. I naively asked the teacher, “does the verb change with its tense?” Of course it does! So that means that after all this effort I could never speak of the past or the future and forget the condition future or pluperfect, whatever that is. My speech became very Be Here Now! Then comes the final nail in the coffin. On the last day of class the teacher informs us that most Israelis talk really, really fast. They talk so fast that the words are blurred and the real secret is to watch their hands. Ultimately Israelis don’t communicate with their words, but with their hand gestures, which, of course, one doesn’t have to go to class to understand.
Actually, I misspoke, the real, final nail came when a student asked how many people actually speak Hebrew in Israel. The teacher got reflective and admitted that most people now speak Russian,(2 million new immigrants) some Ethiopian, a hard core group of Arab-speakers, a smattering of Thai (foreign workers) and fortunately almost everyone uses English as the fall-back language. An observation was made that most teenagers speak Spanish because the hugely popular after school TV shows which were Novellas from South American exclusively in Spanish without subtitles.
One curious result of all this Hebrew study was how rapidly my high school Spanish seemed to come back to me. When the teacher asked me “ata medaberet ivret?” (Do you speak Hebrew?) I instinctively replied, “un poco.” When a fellow student greeted me with “naim maod” (how’s it going), I blurted out, “Que passé.” The more Hebrew words I heard, the more Spanish came pouring out of my mouth. I don’t understand it, but there must be some kind of poly-lingual portion of my mind that stores foreign phrases and once I went down the Hebrew road, it unlocked the Spanish door. Maybe I should go to Mexico City for a couple weeks and hope that my grade school Hebrew suddenly makes an appearance in my conversations.
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