I get that Moses Leading the Jews Through the Desert was Hard but Hebrew Beginning II is Hard too

So I studied like a Crrrrrazyjew for the five days between me peace-ing out of Beginning Hebrew I on Thursday evenings and peace-ing in to Beginning Hebrew II on Tuesday evenings. I took my doorstop-sized Hebrew textbook everywhere with me, which prompted a lot of "Shaloms" and "L'Chaims" from random Jews, making it clear those were the only two Hebrew words they knew.

Suckers, I've been studying my ass fat off, I know TWENTY.

And I made FLASHCARDS. That's when you know you mean business. Or when you know your comprehension/retention rate is hovering pretty close to zero.

Hebrew I learned between Thursday, January 13th, 2010 and Tuesday January 17th, 2010.

I, You, He, She, Teacher, Student, From, Live, Good, Very Good, Okay, Excellent, Okay, Bad, Very Bad, Not Good, So-So, Thank You, Everything, Nothing, As Usual, But, Also, To Haifa, What's New, What's Up, What's Happening, What's Going On, Excuse Me, It's Confusing, Learn, Kids, Bag, Village Now, Economics, Library, Class, A Little, Letter, Homework, Papers, Newspaper, E-mail, Book, Read, Write, The, There, Here, Yes, No, Also, And, The.

Hey, I sold myself short, there's like a good forty Hebrew words bouncing around my left temporal lobe, that's the part of the brain where language is kept, duh, you guys are so stupid.

I'm so smart at Hebrew, guys, I'm basically ready to move to Israel, start a constitutional monarchy, and be their queen, right?

So I get to the new, hard class (only having learned 70 of the 120-something pages I was supposed to have caught up on, but give me a Torah-sized break, I'm a JewHuman not a Jew2001:ASpaceOdysseySpaceshipRobot*) and I ask a blondish-but-still-Jewish-looking-ish middle aged lady student what page she was studying in the book, and she's like "127", and I'm like "Awesome. Then I look at page 127 and I'm like "Oh, wait, I said awesome too soon."

It was not awesome at all. It was anti-awesome. It was awesome-less, devoid of all things awesome, awesome לא טוב

(Translation. Not-Good-Awesome. Does it make sense? No. Did I have to throw it in there to prove that I know a modicum of Hebrew after my five days of studying my butt mass off only to have achieved so little. Apparently I thought so)

So the class begins with מה חדש

This means "Mah Chadash" (you got to get that mucus-hocking chhhhh in the back of your throat) which means "What's new?" and you have to answer something new that happened in the past week in HEBREW, constructing a sentence in HEBREW, what do I do I only know like thirty words in HEBREW.

Right before class I had learned the verb "to read", and I knew the word for "book" and "I", so when it got to me I tentatively tried out קראתי ספרי

And instead of Leeenda being like "You can't speak Hebrew, get out of class right now before I demolish your left temporal lobe with my Hebrew Hammer Fist", instead of that, she nodded and moved on to torture... I mean teach...no I do mean torture, another student.

So I'm feeling okay about my Hebrew at this point and then we continue on in class, where I realize that everyone else knows more than one sentence of Hebrew, because everyone else actually knows Hebrew and I actually really, really don't.

Then Leeenda has to go to the bathroom and I'm like "I'm going to wait outside for her and tell her I can't do this class and it's too hard and then I'll go home early and eat something shitty," which, if you've been reading the blog thusfar, you will know is an activity I'm basically an Olympic athlete at.

Leeenda comes back and I'm outside almost in tears like " I'm having a lot of trouble breathing from all these foreign words I don't know, is it possible to die from feeling stupid?"

And Leeeenda reminds me that the Thursday class is too easy for me (and I remind myself that I basically learned everything I didn't already know in that class in three and a half days) and that there's no failing in this class, because we're no longer in Kindergarten-through-Undergrad "You can get an A, B, C, D or F for Failure Forever, those are your choices" school, we're now in Adult-Ed "Just pay a lot of money and try your best" school. She also adds helpfully that she will "pick me up and drag me along" if I'm lagging behind and I have this image of me tied to the back of Leeeeenda's back bumper, thumping along the pavement as Leeenda zig-zags across the five lanes of the freeway without using her turn signal and I'm like "Okay Leeenda, I'll give it my best shot!" with a very scared smile on my face.

So I follow her back into the classroom and struggle through the rest of class but I learned something SIGNIFICANT AND MEANINGFUL. And it wasn't even Hebrew. It was the only thing BETTER than learning Hebrew and that is learning a LIFE LESSON.

I realized that I learned a lot in five days and I can learn a lot in the next week and the one after that and even if I'm the worst person at Hebrew in this class for the rest of the 6 week term, even if I'm the worst person in every Hebrew class I ever take, at least I'll be learning something, and learning is not about being the winneriest winner or the bestiest best or the Queen of Israel, learning about LEARNING!

And THAT is SOMETHING I can DO! I LOVE CAPITALIZING WORDS FOR EMPHASIS.

So after class, I'm like, all victorious, "Leeenda, I've decided to stay!" And she basically shrugs and is like, "It's your money," which is a very Jewish thing to shrug. And I nod, with a wild-tiger-fierce look in my eye that says "I'm going to do this thing that is hard for me even though almost everything I choose to do in my life is hard for me, because I LIKE PAIN WITH LITTLE TO NO REWARD" which is a very Jewish look to have in your eye.

Next Post- Week Two of Cram-o-Rama.

*If I was going to be a Jewish Robot I would want to a combination of the sultry blonde and the feisty-pants Asian girl robots from rebooted Battlestar Galactica with the underwear selection of the Sexbots from 1960's hot-girl-robot-classic "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine." But for all my newfound android attractive-times-ness I would still have to keep my schnozz-ma-tozz, otherwise how would people know I was a Jewbot? They wouldn't! Compromises!