At The Ulpan
The Ulpan is extremely exhausting - it takes as much energy as the longest, toughest work-day I’ve had. I’ve had courses for one week now, and we’ve done about half of the alphabet. By the end of next week, we should finish the entire alphabet. The above doodle is something I’ve been drawing five days now during the class.
The class is divided into three camps: the Russian speakers, the French speakers, and the English speakers. Most of my coursemates are from former Soviet bloc countries: Russians, Ukranians, Moldovians, and more. There’s one Hungarian, who doesn’t really speak Russian and seems to prefer to talk English. It gives me a chance to show off my random and entirely shitty Hungarian knowledge. “Jó napot! Hogy vagy?”
Despite being a neighbour of Russia, as a Finn I don’t speak more than a few sporadic words of it. (This probably has something to do with our shared history and unfortunate events such as the infamous attempt at the Russification of Finland.) “Horasho” (Good), “Priviet” (Greetings?), “Ja nie pani ma ju” (I don’t understand you), “Njet” (no), “Da” (yes), etc… As well as a few Finnish Helsinki slang words like “Putka” which I am told is directly taken from Russian and means jail. Then throw in a few generic words like “prostitutka” and “muzika” and you have my entire Russian vocabulary.
Most of the Russian-speakers don’t actually speak a word of English, such as the lady sitting next to me, Olga. This means we can only communicate in Hebrew… which is kind of interesting since right now we can only say things like “What’s your name? Good. Where are you from? What do you speak? What do you read? Where do you live? Do you work? Are you a new immigrant?” etc etc…
There’s a Brazilian girl, which is fun, as I know a couple words of Portuguese too. The English-speaking group is completed with two Americans, two South Africans, one Englishman, the Hungarian, and myself.
And then there are the Frenchies, half of which speak some words of English, one speaks English very well, and one speaks no English at all.
All in all, we are over 30, so it is a very large class. Our teacher seems to make sure that everyone gets to speak out loud and practice, however, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Perhaps it is only a good thing to hear the same dialogue 15 times, as it really starts to stick in your memory after so much repetition.
I do think that if the class were any bigger, however, things would be too chaotic.
With all these different language groups, you might wonder what language the teacher teaches in! Well, the answer is, “Hebrew.” She does logical things, such as pointing at herself and saying, “Ani Judit.” or “Ani medaberet ivrit ve anglit! Ani lo medaberet finnit o germanit. Ani medaberet kzat russit.” When you know she speaks a little bit of Russian, and that she doesn’t speak a word of Finnish, the paragraph makes sense.
When something needs more explaining, however, she says it in Russian and English, and then in Hebrew to the French-speakers, who luckily are more advanced in Hebrew than we are.
Hebrew letters are strange to me. In English S can sound like the hard ‘s’ or the soft ‘z’ depending on the situation, but in Hebrew one letter can be all the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) or completely silent, depending on the situation! This sneaky letter is called “aleph”: א
Yeah. It looks like an x, just to make things more confusing.
Some letters even change shape depending on if they are at the end of a word or elsewhere. And to top it all off, they have TWO sets of alphabets, one being the hand-written alphabet and the other the typed alphabet!
Just take a look at my notes and see if they make any sense! (Only half of the alphabet is here, so don’t use it as a source to learn your own Hebrew alphabet!) The teacher has to write the “normal” alphabet and the Russian alphabet next to the Hebrew alphabet every lesson. It’s funny, because most of the Russian letters look like our letters but are just pronounced completely differently.
