Generally, the two of us pride ourselves on having fairly decent Hebrew. We can get around, do our shopping, have intellectual conversations with our Israeli friends and read books, but that by no stretch of the imagination means we are 100% fluent. I am still learning dozens of new words a day in Ulpan (many of which you would never use in casual conversation, but frequently find in newspapers and books, nonetheless...). In any given conversation, news broadcast or radio program we are averaging between 70 and 95% comprehension of all words used - which is not too shabby and does not prevent us from garnering the overall gist of what we are hearing. Last night we went to see a play with one of my Ulpan classmates. At the end we all remarked that the play was very interesting, but we all had a hard time with the first few minutes because the Hebrew was fast and complicated. Once we understood the context of the play, however, the rest became much easier to follow.
The fact that we do have a strong grasp of Hebrew puts us ahead of the curve of many new olim (immigrants) here in Israel. For many newcomers, the first weeks, months and years are an extended crash course in a new language that uses a completely different alphabet and has markedly different grammatical structures. This proves challenging for opening bank accounts, signing leases on apartments and general day-to-day shopping. Thankfully, most Israelis have a decent grasp of English, but that doesn't always help...
Earlier this week we took a train to Netanya to meet one of Matt's college roommates who was here for work. Let me first mention that the fact that we were meeting up with this particular friend in Israel is one of the most unpredictable and amazing occurrences since we made aliyah. This friend, a good Italian boy with no previous connection to Israel (except for Matt, that is) is now working for a company that is building a desalinization plant on the coast of California. The company that is helping them build the plant is an Israeli company that has built similar plants here in Israel. Now this friend gets to come to Israel for meetings and we get the pleasure of meeting up with him. What are the odds... Now back to the train ride. Since we've taken the train before, we knew that you have to get off in at one point and switch trains (not necessarily so obvious for first time train riders). On the second train, at the stop before the one we needed, the conductor made an announcement that the train would not be stopping at the next stop, but would rather be heading straight to Tel Aviv. Any riders who wanted the next stop would have to get off and switch trains again. This announcement was made quickly and only in Hebrew. At that moment we were very thankful that we speak Hebrew, otherwise we would have ended up an hour from our intended destination.
Language barriers can also innocently offend people. Last Shabbat we invited over two couples who are also new in our neighborhood. Both couples had a kid around 2-3 years old and they immediately hit it off and starting playing together. While working on a puzzle, the little boy, whose family had only arrived in the country a few weeks prior, called out to his parents that the little girl told him to "die" and he was very upset. What the little boy didn't understand was that the little girl, whose family had already been in the country for a few months and who had been attending Hebrew speaking Gan (kindergarten), was speaking to him in Hebrew. The word "die" in Hebrew means "enough" and is often used by small children to mean "stop it! leave me alone!" The parents of the children then had to do some quick intervention - "don't worry, honey, she's just speaking Hebrew, she doesn't really want you to die."
And on that note....
Shabbat Shalom and have a great weekend!
Stef and Matt
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