(no subject)

[lethargic_man]

At some point the ulpan I have been attending is going to start again. I have to decide whether to go back again. I've not been practising my Hebrew over the summer, bar leaving the cron job running at both home and work which presents me with a word to translate every twenty minutes, and my vocabulary is gradually leaching words. Even worse, I bumped into the teacher of the introductory class at my old ulpan at Simcha on the Square on Sunday, and could scarcely follow anything she was saying.

Even before I broke for summer, I felt two hours a week was not enough to get me to be able to follow conversations at normal speaking speed. And my mother and others were asking me why bother learning Hebrew if you're not intending to go to Israel.

I'm finding it difficult to find an answer for that question. Really, I suppose it's just that I don't like being a monolingual Brit; I want to be able to hold my own in at least one foreign language. But in order to do that properly, I'm going to need to do something far more intensive than just one two-hour class a week.

(The LJCC held a two-week long summer ulpan; maybe I should have gone on that. But, really, I wouldn't have wanted to blow two weeks of my precious annual leave that early in the (April-to-March) leave year...)

Comments

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

Understanding the fast speach of an Israeli is not that easy. You need more lessons. Do not let your Hebrew slip. It is useful here as well because there are lots of Israelis. I regretted it letting it slip when I came here. The first time I could have actually used it all. I know it is not the case for you but it could have been useful for my current volunteer job or any potential jobs in Jewish kindergartens. Some Israelis are not good in English or do not know it at all. I would have liked to talk to them more.