Hebrew (Part II)
When we left off, my study group and I were
congratulating ourselves over our ability to pronounce lengthy groups of Hebrew
words, but with the recognition that we had absolutely no idea what the
sentences meant or—in fact—whether the sentences made any sense at all.
The following day we were introduced to
vocabulary. For the next two weeks each
day was spent creating flash cards for new vocabulary, ranging from 15 to 25
words per day.
Right now you are thinking: What?!
Flash cards?!! Isn’t that
what my son/daughter used to make in the third grade? The answer is “yes!” Over the course of those two weeks, I made flash
cards; reviewed them; shuffled them; reviewed them again……
While my practice of law required that I
remember events, names, dates medical jargon, deposition testimony, etc., it
was not required that I keep any of that information in my head past the trial. Also, there was no prohibition against
looking back at my notes during a deposition, during a trial or at any other
time during the pendency of a case. You
can imagine my chagrin when I learned the Hebrew professor frowned upon the
practice of reviewing notes and lists of translated words while taking the
exam. As a consequence, I was forced to
actually memorize words.
Then, I learned that the Hebrews had the
audacity to attach stuff to the front or back of words that make them
plural, past tense, past present perfect, feminine, etc. (I learned that these things are called
“prefixes” and “suffixes.”) “But wait,
there’s more”—I found out that the Hebrews, not content with these changes in
number and gender and tense, decided they didn’t want to use separate words for
prepositions such as: “to”, “from”, “with”
and so on. Nope, they decided: “Hey, let’s not waste the space on our tablet
(or papyrus, or whatever they were using to chisel or write upon), let’s just
add a couple more of these squiggly things on the front of these other squiggly
things.”
All of that seemed okay, but then some other
Hebrew decided: “Wow, we can save even
more room if we just drop off some of these squiggly things when we add those
other squiggles. But, to make it really
fun, let’s just do it randomly!” Obviously
the response was: “Great idea, but if we
want to make it wicked cool fun, we
just add some squiggly stuff here and there as well!”
And that’s what they did.
I asked my Hebrew professor “why” those
fun-loving Hebrews came up with this game and his response was: “To confound the wicked!” While the answer was not exactly satisfying,
what really stuck with me was the look he gave me when the word “wicked” came
out of his mouth.
All of this memorization and pondering about why
those Hebrews had it in for some guy from Alabama took place as my first exam
in over 35 years was approaching. There
was some concern on my part about whether my resurrected study skills would
work after the moth balls had been removed.
Exam day came last Monday, August 29 and, yes, I
did have some unpleasant dream about the exam in the nights leading up
to it. I am happy to report that the
results are in and I passed—no doubt to displeasure of those Hebrews who never
wanted their language spoken with an Alabama accent.
The rest of the week was taken up with
Multi-Cultural training. (It was much
more interesting than anticipated and may be the subject of a later post.) Next week we start the regular academic
schedule and while I will still be taking Hebrew, it will be much less
intense. Better still, my other courses
look favorably upon reading and writing in English.
