For a month of our stay in Jerusalem, we did an Ulpan. An Ulpan is an intensive Hebrew class. Every day, (except Friday and Saturday) we went to class for two hours. We got two lessons everyday, each of them private, with a native Israeli Hebrew speaker. While we were with them, we learned new vocabulary and sentence structures, and then we went to speak to people. We are certainly not fluent, but this Ulpan was very good and we enjoyed it. Everyday we went and enjoyed learning and speaking. It was especially fun for me because when they ran out of teachers, the Ulpan director’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Meital, was my teacher. Her English wasn’t that good, so it forced me to speak Hebrew. For that week, I don’t know how much new vocabulary I learned, but I got really comfortable with my old words. When we arrive home, I want to keep studying Hebrew because I feel like it is an important language to know. We keep practicing our Hebrew by talking to each other and emailing our teachers in Hebrew.
My teacher’s name was Noga, and she is very nice. She is a really good teacher, and she forces you to try hard, but not in a mean way-- a useful and encouraging way, which makes it fun. I started the Ulpan already knowing how to read, which was very helpful. Since we’ve been here, I’ve learned how to read and write in script, and I have learned some verbs in the present and past tenses. I have also picked up some adjectives and nouns. I feel like I have improved a lot, but I still have a long way to go. I have found, that I understand a lot more then I can speak.
One thing that came as a little bit of a surprise, was that we had tons of homework everyday, which was a big change from no school at all. As with everything you want, you have to work for it, and we learned that if we work really hard, we can achieve something that we want. It was hard to get used to an hour or more of homework, but it was all for my benefit.
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