Entry #10 - Ulpan 2
When I began the ulpan I ranked myself in the top third of the class. I entered the course able to recognize 200-300 spoken words but not really able to read the alphabet and certainly not scripted Hebrew. But I can get by in Spanish and German, I’m fluent in Danish and English, so I figure another language… no big deal. By the fourth week (that’s eighty hours, remember), I was working very hard to hang out in the middle. All but one of the new immigrants had dropped out as had most of the older people. All those for whom the course was free were gone and I was now the oldest in the class. The teacher is serious and excellent. She speaks almost only Hebrew in class, will only define new words using words we already know. Somehow manages each day to increase her vocabulary to precisely what we’ve been exposed to, no more. I am learning a lot but it is HARD.
The young people in the class are great, but noisy. They love the teacher so it is hard for her to get too mad at them. Besides, the fact that I get to hear certain sentences over and over again helps me learn. “Atem yodim mah zeh sheket?! Az todah! Ani melamedet ve atem shomim!” We get a twenty minute break halfway through class which is spent drinking coffee in the courtyard and is a high point of my day. It turns out that the Palestinian who yelled at me is a very nice guy who always yells. He is a doctor who was trained in Moscow for seven years and his friend is a dentist also trained in Moscow. They are in their early thirties and need to speak Hebrew at quite a high level before they can work at the clinics inside Israel. The young people are really bright and very good students. Of course they learn faster because they are young, but on top of the four hours each morning there is at least two hours of homework, and most of them have jobs. I get to have in-depth conversations with people I would never ordinarly meet, from highly religious Jews to Ukranian communists and Palestinian teenagers.
Now here’s the funny part. On the second day of class I decided to sit in the back row next to the people who shout out the answers (usually wrong, by the way) instead of right in front of them. Another fellow in his late 30’s early 40’s does the same. I assumed that he was German because of the way the teacher pronounced his name but when we go through our nationalities it turns out he is Swedish. On the third day we say “Hello,” for the first time. And by the fifth day we are having coffee and I am practicing my Swedish. He is a major in the Swedish Army and has been deployed on UN missions in Bosnia, Lebanon, and most recently the Sudan. Well-informed and highly impressive. By the end of the second week we are scheduling weekly visits to the pub and I now consider him a good friend.
So, despite all we teach in Service Learning, it is really not a surprise that birds of a feather…
