I've been saying I'm going to learn Hebrew for years now.
But I've been saying I'm going to do A LOT of things for years now. Stop eating shit. Go to the gym. Stop crying about things that are stupid. Stop eating shit.
And then had the novel idea of actually DOING what I kept telling people I was going to do. I say I'm going to learn Hebrew, ergo I go learn Hebrew!
(See the Latin I just threw in there?)
( That's the only Latin word I know)
So I signed up for Hebrew I Thursdays Jan-Beginning of March at the Beverly Hills Language Institute, which sounds like I'm learning a foreign language in a secret golden,bejeweled palace with lots of famous people and Oprah Winfrey gives us all Volkswagens and flat screens when we conjugate our verbs correctly and after class we all gather around the open bar to laugh about poor people and also there are palm trees.
Actually it's something a little more like this.
Community college meets the boring office you work at meets more boring. Yeah!
I squeeze myself into a walk-in closet sized room... where I meet my three non-celebrity-or-famous-or-rich-looking classmates, and Leeeenda, our teacher, because there are no Lih-nda's in Hebrew, there are only Leeeenda's.
Leeenda is American (or possibly Canadian, you never know until you get a person to say "I'm sorry" or "About that") but she grew up in Israel during... a war in Israel. She said which one it was but I didn't make a point to remember and now I forget. The Yom Kippur War? The Six-Day War? One of those Lebanon Wars?
Note to Self: Put "Knowing Which Israeli War is Which" on the long list of "Ways To Stop Being an Embarrassment to the Chosen People."
So we start Hebrew 1 and I realize two important things.
Important Thing One is that I basically know everything we're going to be covering for the eight week course, which is the alphabet, which I learned for my Bat Mitzvah twelve year ago. Don't do the math! I said don't dooooo iiiiiit!
And Important Thing Part II: The Return of the Important Thing is that I have spent $275 on this course and $85 on the textbook and if you're good at math like when you were figuring out how old I was you will have figured out that is $360 dollars and that is a lot of money to spend to take a class where you basically know all the material*
I had a Bat Mitzvah, dude, I go to High Holidays every year (sometimes kicking and screaming, usually kicking and screaming, but I still go) I KNOW how to read Hebrew and that's basically what level 1 was. How to read Hebrew. And how to say hello. Shalom, Shalom Raav, get it, got it, done. So after class I'm like "Um, Leeenda, Todah and everything for a great lesson on the first three letters of Hebrew but I think I know everything that's going to be taught in this class, so.... can we dialogue?"
And Leeeeenda's all Jew York snappy and to the point and says "Just review the next 125 pages of the textbook and come check out the Hebrew II class on Tuesday."
And I was like "Leeenda, totally, I've got this one," because apparently the number "125" and the plural noun "pages" and the fact that the only thing I did know in Hebrew WAS the alphabet were all things that were not computing in my brain.
So I was kind of in a bit of a jam here, a JewJam if you will, because I was all up on the Aleph-Bet and everyone else in Hebrew I all... wasn't. But everyone in Hebrew II was conjugating verbs and structuring sentences without frantically flipping to the dictionary for every single word because most of those words are already in their brain. I was basically like a first grader being told "Well, if you don't want to repeat Kindergarten, I guess you can move on up to 6th grade, they're studying the Declaration of Independence and dissecting pig's eyeballs, you know how to read, right?"
So I was like, okay, for the next week all my free time that I like to use to click refresh a lot on Facebook I'm going to STUDY HEBREW, this is going to be great, I'm so glad I'm learning and growing and enriching my life!
This is exactly as stupid and frustrating and "Why do I make such poor choices for myself?" as it sounds.
Next Post: The Worst JewStudent in Hebrew 2! Or.........me.
* Okay, there was one thing I didn't know in Hebrew 1 and it was a big thing. So I never realized there were 2 Hebrew alphabets--- one for reading (the one you learn when you have a Bar/Bat Mitzvah) and one for writing, the one you write when you... write. I was like "Wait, I can just write my approximation of the print alphabet, I have to learn twenty-two unfamiliar symbols in addition to all the unfamiliar vocabulary I'm cramming into my brain?" And the Hebrew Alphabet is like "You thinks this is difficult, baby, baby, baby, watch what happens when you have to read real Hebrew books and newspapers and shit where the DON'T PRINT THE VOWELS because Israeli people are all about going to the army after high school and living in kibbutzes where you don't get to have any personal property and also living in the Middle East and also basically doing the Hard Version of Everything!"
Just thinking about reading with no vowels makes me want to say goodbye to my three-hundred-something bucks and just sleep on Tuesday nights.But that would definitely be a Worst Jew thing to do and I'm trying NOT to do that!
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