Learning to live life in Hebrew, and so the saga begins...

The official languages of Israel are Hebrew and Arabic. But here in Israel's resort city, Eilat, I've heard as much Russian as I have heard Hebrew.

I never would have imagined there would be this many native Russian language speakers here. Where did they all come from???! As big as Russia is, are there really no warm spots to take a holiday? Thanks to Google Maps I can see that in actuality there are not - wow!

Anyway... thus far in my program we have had three ulpan classes. What is this "ulpan" thing you ask! Ulpan is Hebrew school. But when I say Hebrew school it's not like the two-to-three-times-per-week religious classes you used to attend at your family's synagogue. It's more like the Spanish class you used to attend in middle school.

Ulpan is very interactive, modern and secular from biblical Hebrew. On our first day of ulpan we learned the word for drunk - מסטול (mah-stool).

Hebrew is a very cool language. It's like a puzzle. Almost every word receives some kind of conjugation when being used in conjunction with other words. There are feminine and masculine conjugations, singular and plural, and definite and indefinite.

One of the most challenging tasks [of being a new Hebrew speaker in Israel] is attempting to read signage throughout town. In English we use capital letters to mark a word as a proper noun. Since Hebrew only has one case, it has been near impossible to distinguish whether a word on a sign is a proper noun, like a place, or rather if it is just a word I have not yet learned.

This yellow banner reads: "Beit ochel Italki" - this means "Italian restaurant." I had to look up the word Italki. However if it had been capitalized I like to think that perhaps I would have been able to decipher the word's meaning on my own. (And let's not forget to note the sign's resemblance to my last name :-D)

I have been trying to force myself to speak Hebrew in lieu of English as much as possible. But let me tell you, in a country where most people speak better English than I do Hebrew it is an uphill battle. I have just learned the past tense, so I can now tell people what I used to do for work in the U.S. and where I used to live. If I had to guess I would say I probably speak Hebrew at the level of a 3-year-old child, if even that well.

By the end of the program my goal is to be able to eavesdrop on Hebrew phone conversations on the bus and to understand 90% of the dialogue. For now, my 20% will have to do ;)