שפה משותפת
Our Common Language
By Gavriel Aryeh Sanders
The learning of Torah is incomplete without the critical component of chazarah (repetition/review). This is well-known. The review process etches the information more retrievably in the active memory and enables the student to make important connections between one sugya and another, one pasuk and another, one Navi and another, one mitzvah and another, one halachah and another.
This same principle applies to numerous categories of learning, not the least of which is second-language acquisition. Absent the opportunity to live or work in an environment where the student can interact with native speakers regularly, a self-directed system of review is critical to anchor and retain new vocabulary and phrases. As Korea-based EFL instructor Anne Merritt wrote in The Telegraph in 2013:
“In a vocabulary class, yesterday’s vocabulary is more important than today’s. The goal is to transfer the short-term knowledge of new vocabulary into your long-term memory. Review is essential—in the first few days or weeks after learning new vocabulary, recycle those words and you’ll entrench them in your memory. A good language textbook or online program will be organised in a way that reviews and applies learned vocabulary in later lessons.”
There’s the rub—in the last sentence. From my own survey of Hebrew learning materials, organized review is not consistent. Furthermore, no text can assess what you do or don’t know, what you have or haven’t retained. A textbook, a CD language course, or prerecorded online videos are one-way content delivery vehicles. Without a teacher or some personally interactive tool of assessment, you don’t have feedback to determine your progress. What happens? Frustration, loss of interest, abandonment of effort, and the false conclusion that “well, I’m just not good at languages.” But that’s not true.
If you are reading this column, you’ve already mastered one of the more difficult of Western languages. English is a cholent of chaotic inconsistencies. There are serious gaps between what is written and what is spoken (Whydja do that? Wherya gotta go? Didja eachyet (did you eat yet)? Whatcha wanna do?) Just how many different pronunciations are there for words spelled with -ough? (There are seven in American English and British English has ten!)
The English verb system is painful to figure out. The regular verbs written with -ed in the past have three possible final phonemes: (1) -d as in used, called; (2) -t as in worked, washed; and (3) -‘id as in painted, ended. The irregular verbs, which tend to be high frequency in occurrence, have one, two, or three different tense forms. For example: One form: Now I’ll put the plant here. I put it there yesterday. I have put it in five places this week. Two forms: We build houses. We built one last week. We have built ten this year. Now three forms: She writes a column. She wrote one yesterday. She’s written thirty so far. (Add to this be/was/been, shake/shook/shaken, run/ran/run, upset/upset/upset.) Can you imagine the upset an adult learner of English as a second language feels? It takes years to get it write—uh, right! You’ve internalized all this.
So with that commendable accomplishment in mind, how can you apply review and retention in learning Ivrit as a second language? I recommend Quizlet, as in Quizlet.com. It’s perfect for building vocabulary and phrases lists for review and assessment. Quizlet is a big part of how I work with my high-school Ivrit students. It transforms the conventional boring vocabulary list into an interactive experience which the student can use to learn new words, review recent terms, build multiple choice, matching, and true/false self-tests, along with a couple of fun games. While basic Quizlet is free, there is a premium option ($34.99/year) which allows a student or teacher to build study sets with bilingual audio, add custom graphics, track student progress, and search content created by other teachers (a big time-saver). Hebrew is only one application of Quizlet. Thousands of teachers have produced tens of thousands of Quizlets on scores of subjects. I did a Google search on: “finance Quizlet” and pulled up a couple of pages of links.
Earlier this year, I created a short nine-item Quizlet to teach my students the five senses in Hebrew. You can see that at https://quizlet.com/138082569/the-senses-flash-cards/. Once there, click on Flashcards. On the first card (חוּשׁ – חוּשׁים), click the OPTIONS tab on the lower left. Notice how you can start the parade of flashcards with Hebrew first, English first, or both languages on the same side. (Learning note: It’s easier to go from Hebrew to English; it’s more challenging to go from English to Hebrew.) After you’ve reviewed the nine flashcards, hit the back button (upper left under the word “Quizlet”). Now click on the word TEST just above the list of terms. Click on the OPTIONS tab again. Now you can customize a self-test. (Note: Quizlet doesn’t do well with the ‘written’ option with Hebrew, so toggle that off.) By clicking the other options on or off, you can create a self-test of matching, multiple choice, or true/false. By just toggling off the written option, Quizlet will create a self-test with elements of all three of those.
In my Ivrit classes, Quizlets are provided by the curriculum developer (Ulpan Or) for each unit of study. Some are short (12–15 words) and some are long (over 30 words), depending on the content we are learning. I’ll assign a particular unit Quizlet at the beginning of a week, knowing we’ll have a written quiz on it later in the week. The students review the flashcards on their own, alternating from English to Hebrew and vice-versa as needed. They take their own practice tests on their iPads or iPhones, repeating them until they reach 90% or higher. I review the latest list once or twice in class during the week to see if we have any ambiguities to clear up. When we take the written quiz, they nearly always score 100%.
But how does this discussion help you, the reader of this column? Very simply. If you are an active learner of Hebrew, you need a reliable review system. Forget long lists in notebooks or stacks of 3×5 cards. You can build your own digital lists with Quizlet and review them as needed. You can share them with friends and family if you so choose. Your Quizlet lists will be available on your desktop computer, your tablet, or your web-enabled phone. Quizlet comes with a built-in Hebrew keyboard or you can cut and paste from Word or DavkaWriter text.
In the interest of comparative resources, there is another language-based flashcard system called Anki (www.ankiweb.net). A search on “Anki Hebrew” will pull up useful frequency lists: 500 basic Hebrew words, 100 basic Hebrew verbs, 100 basic Hebrew phrases, and Hebrew numbers from one to a billion. It’s very easy to transfer Anki cards via cut and paste into Quizlet sets. Anki Hebrew cards all come with words and phrases recorded by a native Hebrew speaker. These lists, along with Hebrew dialogs and Hebrew grammar by example, are available free at www.teachmehebrew.com. For the more advanced student of Ivrit, there’s a challenging list of 10,000 most common Hebrew words.
!הצלחה רבה ברכישת שפתנו המשותפת
Gavriel Aryeh Sanders has spoken to tens of thousands of Jews across North America and abroad delivering lively lectures related to Jewish living and learning, including his autobiography on “A Minister’s Journey to Judaism.” He currently teaches Hebrew at a Long Island Jewish high school. Your comments and questions are always welcome at GavrielSanders@gmail.com.