Rishon Rishon

Linguistic Imbecile

You've probably figured out by now that I like linguistics. In fact, I can't remember ever not liking linguistics. Long before I knew that such a thing existed, and that other people thought seriously about such matters, I remember noticing that the consonants y and w were an awful lot like the vowels i and u (that's why they're called semivowels, but I didn't know that). I can remember being around 7 or 8 years old, and arranging the letters of the alphabet in different ways according to their characteristics: voiced/unvoiced, stop/fricative, point-of-articulation, etc. Of course, I didn't know any of those terms. For a long time, around age 10, I was interested in devising a spelling system with the minimum number of symbols, for example the 14 letters: b, c, d, f, g, j, k, p, q, s, t, v, x, z could be replaced with just five: 3 for points of articulation, and 1 each for voiced and stop. All this was inspired simply by observing the two writing systems I knew, since I had never even heard of linguistics. For example, I noticed that ph (sounding like f) is a p that doesn't stop the air flow, t is sometime pronounced like d, s like z, etc. Every once in while I would think of a new way to reduce the number of letters, and I would update my private hypothetical spelling system.

I also liked 'grammar' such as I was taught, which wasn't much. I don't ever remember having a problem with it, even though it was widely hated by the smart kids I went to school with (I was in the top-rated school district in Massachusetts). But, when I got to college, the idea of studying linguistics was ridiculous to me. Why? Because I was not just a poor language student, I was a linguistic imbecile.

I started learning a second language at a young age, for an American: I started learning Hebrew when I was seven years old. I remember liking it at first, I had no trouble with the Hebrew alphabet. Since Hebrew writing is perfectly phonetic (you just have to learn one special rule: -יו at the end of a word is -av, not -ayv) it's no problem to read without understanding. But once we got to the language itself, my peers zoomed ahead leaving me completely in the dark. For the next six years I sat in Hebrew class not understanding a thing that was going on around me.

Several years later I entered seventh grade. In seventh grade they started teaching me French. It was my chance to redeem myself. For years I had been sitting in Hebrew class understanding nothing, without a prayer of ever catching up. Now I could start over at the same level as everyone else. We got quarterly grades in my school, and my first grade was a C. It was downhill from there. In eighth grade, while my 80 classmates went to French class, I went to a special study session with three other kids. One of them was a new kid who had studied a different language the previous year. I was used to being one of the smart kids, and now I was in the bottom 4%. One of three kids too dumb to learn French with the rest of the class.

In High School I took French again. Started from the beginning, again. My High School class had 500 kids. Out of those 500 were maybe a dozen who, for whatever reason (strange, I never asked) were taking French over. I was one of those kids. I stuck with this same class for three years, advancing a grade every year without learning a thing. I actually managed to do fairly well, getting Bs and Cs, but not by learning French. The reason I did well: All the tests were multiple choice. I became quite good at reverse-engineering the answers to questions, while understanding neither the question nor the answer. They tended to give choices which were all of which were variations of the right answer. The trick was to figure out which answer differed least from all the others.

Finally, I graduated High School, and went to University of Pennsylvania. They didn't have much in the way of requirements there, except for distributional requirements, but they did have two: You had to pass an English test and a foreign language test. I don't remember the English requirement - I took the test and passed as soon as I got there, but the foreign language requirement was supposedly the equivalent of four semesters of study. I decided, for personal reasons, to go for Hebrew.

So there I was, with years and years of Hebrew experience behind me, taking an intro to Hebrew class. I got a C. And, once again, it was downhill from there. I had a really nice Israeli grad student teaching me, but at the end of 3 semesters, she agreed to pass me only on the condition that I didn't take Hebrew the following semester. What to do? I needed four semesters to graduate. Not that it would be enough, in my case, since I would still need to pass a test. I figured that my only hope was total immersion. I looked for Hebrew programs in Israel. The next summer I went to Kibbutz Ketura (Qibus Q'tura in the orthography of this site) to learn Hebrew.

It was an eight-week work-study program. Half a day we worked, half studied. I got up before dawn every day at 3:45, got dressed, had a cup of coffee, and climbed into a tractor which would take us down to the fields. The sun would be rising over the mountains of Moab as we rode down, and it was COLD. We were all lightly dressed, because we knew it would be 110°F before we came back, but we all warmed ourselves by those first rays, and when the sun came fully over the mountains we were always grateful. We worked for four hours, came back at 8:00, and had a big breakfast. The food was quite simple, but as I remember it, it was very good. This was also the time when I learned to drink coffee. We made coffee out in the fields by throwing the grounds, some sugar, and water into an old cast-iron pot, and putting the pot directly into a fire which we built on the sand. The pot had a fixed handle arching over the top, which we used to remove it from the fire, hooking it with a convenient stick. The result was strong and sweet, a little burnt, with something of a metallic flavor. It was the best coffee I've ever had.

After breakfast, at 9:00, we'd begin the Ulpan. (Ulpan, in Hebrew, means studio, but it's also used to refer to classes in Hebrew as a second language.) There were two classes, which were called alef and bet, after the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. I was in bet, but our teacher explained to us that the class wasn't really at bet-level, according to national standards (in which there are 6 levels, alef to vav, after the first six letters of the Hebrew language), our class was more like alef plus. So there I was, after years and years of Hebrew study, including three semesters of university-level Hebrew, in alef plus.

It's not clear to me how important the class time was for me. By this time I was a kind of idiot savant of Hebrew. I knew Hebrew grammar backwards and forwards (better than I do today), and this was the kind of thing we spent a lot of time on in class. My weak point - so weak as to be non-existent - was comprehension and speaking. My vocabulary was lousy, but even when I knew the words I was incapable of understanding them when they were spoken. Translating each word, figuring out the root, pattern, person, tense, figuring out which words were which parts of speech, were all things I could do, but not nearly fast enough for it to be any use in understanding real speech. Speaking was a little better - if my listener was patient enough, I could, eventually, produce a grammatically correct sentence, assuming I had the vocabulary. I knew that this was what I had to work on, and for some reason, I also knew how.

My Hebrew teacher, back at Penn, had once told us in Hebrew, tapping her head, "You don't learn Hebrew through the head," tapping her foot, "you learn it though the foot." This is a play on on words, because 'the foot' in Hebrew is haregel, while hergel (same root) is habit. You learn language through habit - the foot. I had spent something like 15 years trying to learn Hebrew through the head, and somehow I knew that my head was getting in the way of learning it. Instead of trying to figure out the Hebrew around me, I made a deliberate attempt not to try to figure it out. Instead, I would just listen to it. Let it wash over me and though me. My Ulpan teacher was very nice, and it is probably because of her that I can speak Hebrew now. After lunch people would usually nap, and around 4:00 start socializing for a couple hours before dinner. (We seemed to gain an extra meal: breakfast was like lunch, lunch like dinner, and then there was another meal at 6:00!) Every day I would visit my Ulpan teacher and listen to her talk to her friends. In the morning, out in the fields, I was lucky to be paired up with one of the few other serious students, and we'd talk in Hebrew, to the best of our ability. I made every effort I could to immerse myself in Hebrew.

At the end of the eight-week program we spent one week touring the county. We combined forces with another Kibbutz, which had the same work-study program. There I met a student about at about my level who was willing to talk to me raq b`ivrit - only in Hebrew. We spent a lot of time in busses, going from one place to another, and we spent a lot of time trying to speak Hebrew.

Then one day - I remember this clearly - I was sitting on the bus, as usual trying to speak Hebrew with my fellow student, when suddenly I realized - I was thinking in Hebrew! And that was the end of the beginning. From that point on, I have never had a problem with foreign languages. Not Hebrew - I went back to Penn and easily got an A in the final semester, and even took a Hebrew literature class following that - and not any other language. Some years later I took a class in spoken Arabic (Jerusalem dialect) and had no problems - I was even one of the better students.

Something changed that day on the bus. It was as if a new module had been forged in my brain. It makes me wonder: What else can I do?

Posted by David Boxenhorn at January 13, 2005 11:29 PM