Classroom Languages

I always heard that Hebrew is a classroom kind of language. So, as an independent (not necessarily smart) learner, I always avoided such languages, so I never really thought of brushing up my Hebrew by taking any individual actions. But later, when I wanted to dig in my forgotten Jewish roots, I decided that it was just the time that I SPEAK Hebrew, not just knowing few words, that are related to religion, anyway.

The typical recommendation was given by all my friends who know a bit about Hebrew, the start-taking-classes advice. But honestly, since I am not a classroom kind of guy, except for teaching on and off, I didn't want to sit any Hebrew classes.

So the ''challenge'' was to learn Hebrew without the classroom environment, even without a tutor. Actually struggling in learning Italian helped me a lot later with the dos and don'ts, so I decided to take the short way and avoid all mistakes related to my Italian learning experience, first mistake is surely sitting classes, second was concentrating on the written instead of the spoken language .So I immediately got Pimsleur Hebrew course, since Michelle Thomas, unfortunately, didn't make a Hebrew course.

After finishing level 1, I realized the main reason why people think of Hebrew as a classroom language. Actually it's the same reason why they assume that Japanese, Chinese and Russian are classroom kind too.

It's the fact that those languages don't have a typical Latin alphabets (Russian does to some extent) Even Japanese and Chinese don’t even have alphabets at all!

As far as I know, most language learners want to speak the language desperately, but they are not so desperate when it comes to writing down what they want to say. Google doesn’t let people hit so many dictionaries these days, even people started caring so much about their spelling.

So I believe that speaking a language should be much prior to writing it. I could lead a basic conversation without a problem in 2 months, and I never felt I am missing much just because I can’t write Shalom in Hebrew alphabet.

After I was able to have some basic conversation, I decided it was time to start writing down a little bit, and the process took me around two days to master (nothing smart about me, it’s just that easy) I realized then how different it is when you completely understand what you are trying to write, since I did it the other way around in Russian.

Nothing beats spoken words specially when they are in your target language, make sure you learn so much of the spoken language before you start worrying about how you write things down.

THERE IS NOTHING such as classroom languages, under normal circumstances you don’t need a classroom or a tutor, get all decent audio courses you can get, after few months of improving your conversational skills, feel free to start getting familiar with the written language.