nogoodnik Senior Member United States Joined 5560 days ago 372 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Russian, French
| Message 57 of 84 18 March 2011 at 10:14pm | IP Logged |
Bentzi: Welcome! Please stick around, we need more Israelis around here. Don't get too drunk this purim and neglect your studies....or is that just me? :)
O.K. friends. First sort of mini-breathrough with Russian, or lack of breathrough with French. I'm an optimist, so I'm calling it a step forward with Russian. I sort of understand Russian T.V., or at least I understand it a lot more than French T.V. I'm watching these sort of shallow soap opera type shows and I have a lot of visual cues, but I'm excited nonetheless.
I haven't been doing my Assimil and I feel appropriately guilty. I will start up with that again hopefully soon. I don't know why I'm being so lazy in that respect. Once I get into a good rhythm with Assimil I usually have the motivation to finish it.
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nogoodnik Senior Member United States Joined 5560 days ago 372 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Russian, French
| Message 58 of 84 21 March 2011 at 6:41pm | IP Logged |
I'm starting to think I may be a little abnormal :) here is the evidence:
I've started going to a new synagogue around here because most of the attendees are Israeli. I actually disagree with a lot of the stuff the Rabbi says, but I need my Hebrew input and my old synagogue is populated exclusively by Americans. I figure that I can work on my Hebrew debating skills.
I also joined jdate, which is an online dating site. There is a feature where you can look up who is online based on what language they speak and organize your matches based on language. Essentially, what I've been doing is looking up Hebrew, Russian, French, and Yiddish speakers and then trying to start conversations with them. So far it's working out really well for me with Russian.
Last night I got a lot of good grammar explanations from a Russian guy on that site. I asked him, "Do you mind that I'm using you for your Russian skills?" His reply was, "According to my Grandmother, she started dating my Grandfather in order to get free Russian lessons. So no, I don't mind." I think we are having coffee tonight so I'm coming prepared with questions.
I've also decided that I don't feel like studying anymore. This will probably change soon, but for now I'm just going to try to engage with native materials as much as possible.
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Anno Triglot Newbie Israel acquiringkorean.word Joined 5620 days ago 29 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English, Korean, Dutch Studies: Turkish, Mongolian, Modern Hebrew, French
| Message 59 of 84 21 March 2011 at 6:47pm | IP Logged |
Nogoodnik, what courses would you recommend for Hebrew? I'm using Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur 1,2,3 to
complement my watching Hebrew movies and listening to Hebrew music. After I"m done with Rosetta Stone and
Pimsleur I was planning on working through some of Colloquial Hebrew which I found online -- but are there better
books out there?
And how did you work on learning all the tenses and verb forms? They're rather confusing to me at the moment
with the all vowel changes and prefixes and sufixes.
--
Acquiring Hebrew (language learning blog)
Acquiring Korean
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nogoodnik Senior Member United States Joined 5560 days ago 372 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Russian, French
| Message 60 of 84 21 March 2011 at 6:53pm | IP Logged |
Anno-Have you thought about signing up for an ulpan while you are in Israel? I've known several people who have picked up the language extremely quickly that way, in addition to living in country and using native materials.
I've never used Rosetta Stone and it doesn't have a great reputation on this website. I can't comment on that. I did use Pimsleur and it helped me get the confidence to begin speaking.
In terms of the tenses and verb forms, are you talking about all of the binyanim? I didn't really learn them in a traditional way. I just listened to a lot of audio, extracted sentences and phrases from TV and books and entered them into my SRS. I would like to go back and do a formal study of grammar at some point, but I learned the forms by studying the ways that natives use them and internalizing it.
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Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5325 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian
| Message 61 of 84 22 March 2011 at 10:40pm | IP Logged |
nogoodnik wrote:
Last night I got a lot of good grammar explanations from a Russian guy on that site. I asked him, "Do you mind that I'm using you for your Russian skills?" His reply was, "According to my Grandmother, she started dating my Grandfather in order to get free Russian lessons. So no, I don't mind." I think we are having coffee tonight so I'm coming prepared with questions.
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I love being on your team. I am having so much fun just reading about your Russian guys. This one sounds like a keeper by the way...
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joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5461 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German
| Message 62 of 84 23 March 2011 at 6:36pm | IP Logged |
nogoodnik wrote:
I'm starting to think I may be a little abnormal :) here is the evidence:
I've started going to a new synagogue around here because most of the attendees are Israeli. I actually disagree with a lot of the stuff the Rabbi says, but I need my Hebrew input and my old synagogue is populated exclusively by Americans. I figure that I can work on my Hebrew debating skills.
I also joined jdate, which is an online dating site. There is a feature where you can look up who is online based on what language they speak and organize your matches based on language. Essentially, what I've been doing is looking up Hebrew, Russian, French, and Yiddish speakers and then trying to start conversations with them. So far it's working out really well for me with Russian.
Last night I got a lot of good grammar explanations from a Russian guy on that site. I asked him, "Do you mind that I'm using you for your Russian skills?" His reply was, "According to my Grandmother, she started dating my Grandfather in order to get free Russian lessons. So no, I don't mind." I think we are having coffee tonight so I'm coming prepared with questions.
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I've found that going out with people is one of the best ways to get better at languages (my husband is American), so I suppose a dating site makes senses. Though I don't think I would dare just go: hey, I'm not really interested in you, but I want to suck you dry of language practice. Though if they don't mind...
So do you live in Israel or in the US?
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nogoodnik Senior Member United States Joined 5560 days ago 372 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Russian, French
| Message 63 of 84 23 March 2011 at 7:35pm | IP Logged |
Solfrid Cristin: I love being on your team too. I've gained a lot of inspiration from your log this year. Yes that guy is really nice :)
Joanthemaid: Yes I'm probably extremely guilty of language banditry. The thing is that I do actually want to date someone but I only have so much time. If I can combine language learning and dating simultaneously, it is efficient and enjoyable and we never run out of things to talk about. Plus the Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian speakers seem to think it's cute...so if I can get away with it..:) I live in the US btw. and nice to meet you also :)
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benzion Diglot Newbie Israel Joined 5001 days ago 4 posts - 7 votes Speaks: Modern Hebrew*, EnglishC2 Studies: Russian, Persian, Arabic (classical)
| Message 64 of 84 28 March 2011 at 8:38pm | IP Logged |
hi there,
Purim was really good and fun here in Israel. Now preparing for Passover. cleanning and throw out old stuff. any way I found out it's really really hard to learn 3 languages at the same time period. Arabic and Russian I hear every day in the streets Persian I can talk to my neigbour and my grandma. still it's hard also to study math with that. hard but I'm doing it. I'm thinking to take a private tutoring in Russian. hour and half session a week...
Anyway after all that I got present to those who seek hebrew stories :
http://sefer-li.net/
there is a big list of stories there all in PDF format and it's for children
but there is no points on the letters = hard for the fresh beginners.
Good night all !!
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