Improvements :)

Hello,

I thought I should take advantage of my last night of vacation to write on this blog (even though my book is looking rather tempting...)

All is well here. I'm definitely in a more frustrated stint with my Hebrew at the moment. Basically I am at a stage where I understand some, and my reading is getting faster and better, but if someone expects me to answer them, and actually conjugate something I'm like "Ummm, I'm good thanks?"

Something else really frustrating is when I see a word and ask what it means, and then after I look it up I realize I already know it. So embarrassing! I often wish that the first time I see a word it engraved itself in my mind. Wouldn't that be awesome? My head could be like a three-dimensional dictionary with words and images associated with them leaping off the walls and swimming in the brain matter...

But things improve, and time moves on. The months feel like weeks, and the people are like flies...just kidding, nobody is too annoying at present. ;)

Some improvements from a few months ago:

*I now mostly understand when a store clerk is asking if he/she can help me, so I  know how to answer him/her that I'm doing fine, thank you. This is opposed to not so long ago when I would enter a store and stare determinedly at my feet pretending I heard no one asking me anything.

*I'm not as afraid to be left in a parking lot or by a shop as I used to be, because by now in general I can gather when someone is addressing me, and vaguely filter all the dialogue around me for key words like "danger", "fire", etc. However, it is still terrifying to be in a mall with the knowledge that I might not actually know if an emergency was going on. Imagine: the speaker announcement would probably be in Hebrew, the signs would  be in Hebrew, the marked exits would be in Hebrew. I would have to rely on seeing throngs of people running to know if I was in danger. Quite a scary thought actually.

*I now recognize some of the words and sentences I learn in class on the street. But the sad reality is that people here, much like people in America, and probably most places in the world, don't all always speak correctly. This is on the one hand very devastating and difficult as a learner of the language, but on the other hand also rather funny. Many natives are very amused by my looks of deep concentration and then burst into giggles when I tell them my furrowed brow was because someone said "Chamesh Shekel" when it should have been "Chamisha shkalim." (In Hebrew there is gender and number for words, and those are different ways to say 5 units of Israeli currency. However, since the word for the currency is a male word, the numbers need to be male as well. And then there is also a rule for how to make it plural depending on if the amount ends in a 0 or not.)

Lastly I would like to share a funny insight my elder sister had and shared with me. Today we had to go to an office to get our university diplomas recognized and when we entered the building the guard asked us "where are you going?" in Hebrew. My sister always does all the talking (thank G-d!) and it took her a moment to conjure up the name of the office we were going to (in part, no doubt, because my father's handwriting on our page of directions was not the easiest to decipher). In the end the guard switched to English actually, but anyway, after this I was talking with my sister and we were discussing those moments in a foreign language where someone asks you a basic question like "where are you going?" and all the sudden it's like this big philosophical issue. Who am I? Where is my life going? Where Should I be? And it's very humerous because these are simple questions being asked, and yet when you have to think to answer (because you're sorting through language files in your brain) sometimes it feels like the questions are deeper.

Alright, time for me to stop boring the masses. I bid every reader, as always, good night, morning, or afternoon.

מה לעשות? בחיים שלי יש הרבה דרכים! כל יום אני שואלת עצמי "מה לעשות? מי אני?" עדיין אין תשובות...אבל זה החיים

Translation: What to do? My life has a lot of paths/ways! Every day I ask myself "What to do?" Who am I?" Still there is no answers...but this is life.

Yours etc,
Shira