My Hebrew teacher sent us an mp3 file of the song "Yerushalayim Shel Zahav" (Jerusalem of Gold). I found this video of the song on YouTube. For information about this hauntingly beautiful song visit this link.
My Hebrew teacher sent this to us via email. Look how beautiful!
Shana Tovah, Everyone!
I've been practicing reading scripture verses in Hebrew this week. This video depicts the several verses we've been asked to become familiar with. We've not learned the meaning of all the words, but the exercise in speaking aloud the Hebrew phonetics is good for developing "muscle memory." I really enjoy the many videos our teacher makes for us. She goes the extra mile in teaching. We are very lucky to have such a caring teacher.
Here is a video my teacher referred to me through YouTube. It is a beautiful song, Psalm 121, sung by a popular Israeli singer, Ninet Tayeb. Here is the English translation:
Song of Ascents
I lift my eyes to the mountains - from where will my help come? My help will come from the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot falter; your Guardian does not slumber. Indeed, the Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. The Lord is your Guardian; the Lord is your protective shade at your right hand. The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul. The Lord will guard your going and your coming from now for all time.
We had a good class this evening. We were introduced to singular/plural and feminine/masculine noun and adjective endings. I'm sure we will get into alot of exceptions within time, but the general gist of this is that masculine nouns have no specific suffix, while feminine nouns generally end in "ah" (ie: horse: sous - masculine, sousah - feminine). A good horse would be sous tov. A good mare would be sousah tovah. The plural masculine ending would be "im" (ie: horses: sousim), and the plural feminine would be "ot" (ie: mares: sousot). Good mares would be sousot tovot. This can get pretty confusing because the pronunciation of the vowels within a given word can change based on the suffixes! Also, as I've mentioned in my examples above, the adjectives generally will match the noun it follows (yep - in English the adjective precedes the noun, of course. But in Hebrew, the adjective follows the noun. Pretty interesting...
My teacher explains this in detail in the video below:
I'm out of the office today, visiting another town where I am holding interviews. But I never miss an opportunity to stop for a coffee when I find a pleasant coffee shop where I can take a lunch break and study my Hebrew lesson. I've had 5 lessons so far, and I am having a great time learning! I have a wonderful teacher who is very creative; I like how she uses YouTube to further demonstrate some of the points she covers in our weekly online class.
Oh- today I'm having the "coffee of the day" - toasted almond. I should be drinking decaf, but I couldn't resist this delicious flavor! As a matter of fact, I'm having a re-fill :-)
Every day I practice writing my vocabulary. I write in Hebrew, then transliterate to Latin script...
I'm steadily learning more vocabulary. However, Wednesday's lesson focused on learning the names of the vowels. We learned about patach and qamats (the English sound of "a" in father), segol (the English short "e" sound with 3 small dots under the letter), tsere (another "e" vowel represented by 2 small dots under the letter), segol male with "mater lectionis", hireq (which transliterates to the latin "i" but sounds like the English long "e" - represented as a single dot below the letter), holem (which is represented by a single dot at the upper left corner of the letter - sounds like the English long "o"), and qibbuts (3 diagonal dots below the letter, representing the English "u" sound. I think I said that all correctly :-) Here is a video my teacher, Sigal,sent to the class covering this subject.
Today has been a good day - I've had the opportunity to do my Hebrew homework early in the day before getting that end-of-day tiredness that settles in after a long hard day at work. Speaking of work, I've been on the road alot this week, and while on the road I found this quaint little coffee shop in Burgaw called "Courthouse Coffee!" It's a perfect spot for an iced coffee (or mocha latte) and study. It was quiet both times I visited. I was able to use my laptop and work on my Hebrew assignments. Wow- what could be better! Well except that I would have loved to have shown my wife this sweet oasis of coffee delight! We both love to visit coffee houses. And we enjoy them so much because we don't go to them just to drink coffee- we love to talk with each other, discuss the Bible, make plans, talk about how good God is, etc.
About my study... I've been having a little trouble pronouncing the Hebrew letter, "resh." I mean, I can say it with a slight trill, but my Israeli teacher's "r's" sound a bit French. I made a recording of words with "r" and sent it to her for her critique. She said that although it's not quite the modern Hebrew pronunciation, my resh was "beautiful and soft" :-) and that my pronunciation was more the Sephardic accent (Sephardic Jews originated in the Iberian Peninsula - Spain and Portugal). My wife, Ana Maria, is from Portugal, by the way, so my pronunciation makes her very happy :-)
Anyway, I'm on my way into Biblical Hebrew, and I'm grateful to God for allowing me this opportunity to study.
I'm spending a few minutes each day memorizing my new vocabulary. I'm also practicing writing in Hebrew, and then transliterating the words in Latin letters. I don't think my letters look TOO bad..
