Here in Highland Park, New Jersey

The Rebbetzin’s Husband presents HH #178

Blogging is to oneself

Conversation in our house yesterday:
Friend of Hubby: How do you say ‘to blog’ in Hebrew? Is it “l’blohg” or “l’baleyg”?
Hubby: L’hitbaleyg.
(Explanation: L’hitbaleyg is a verb construction in Hebrew called hitpael. Hitpael is a verb in which one does something to oneself, such as l’hitlabesh is to get oneself dressed. So since blogging is often about oneself, it fits).

Why humor suffers in translation

Marx Brothers line:
Soup and rice. Soup and rice. Soup-rice, soup-rice, surprise.
Translation into Hebrew:
Marak v’orez. Marak v’orez. Marak-orez, marak-orez, Hafta’ah!

Really funny: Benji tries to woo Israeli women

Last week my Middle Son was learning about resistance during the Shoa (the Holocaust). One of the ways Jews kept up their spiritual resistance to the Nazis was by reciting the “Ani Ma’amin”. Gail posted a translation of the phrase and mentioned use of this phrase in the Shoa, which gave me the idea for this post.

This is the phrase in the original Hebrew:

This is the 12th of the Rambam’s 13 Principles of Faith. (thanks, LOZ)

So, getting back to Middle Son: he had a vocabulary test last week. I often help him study for Hebrew tests, because I really enjoy learning along with him. My husband studies with him on his Mishneh, social studies, science, and other tests. His Hebrew teacher is definitely his most challenging teacher.

One of the words on his test was: יתמהמה
Transliteration: yitmameihah
Say that ten times fast. “yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah ”
Hard, no?
Now what happens if the teacher gives you the following as a translation for the strange word “yitmameihah”, and you are a 5th grader with a 5th grade vocabulary:
procrastinate
(other translations say “linger” or “tarry”)

So my son did not know what “procrastinate” meant. So I came up with some explanation, something about delaying something happening and continued to test him, alternatively asking him the Hebrew or the English word. He had a very difficult time with this word.

So I told him:
mem-heh-mem-heh
In Hebrew, the roots of a word are often only three letters. This is an exception word, one that has a seemingly two letter root (mem being the first and heh being the second), and the root is doubled, thus “mem-heh-mem-heh”. A similar word might be wheel: galgal. The “yit” part of “yitmameihah” means that it is hitpael, or a reflexive verb, one that is done to oneself. I was hoping that by breaking down the word into its parts, he might be able to remember it.

No such luck. On Friday afternoon, after the test was over and he was home, I asked him how he did on the test. “Good,” he replied. I believe him. He usually knows.

“How do you say ‘procrastinate’ ?” I quizzed him.
I got some garbled answer that sounded sort of like a distance relative of “yitmameihah”.
Oh, well.

I have to type a few characters of Hebrew for some work I am doing, so I thought I would add a link to the Hebrew Keyboard.

If you have Windows XP or Vista, you can type in Hebrew (type ‘microsoft xp hebrew’ in a search engine and click on the Microsoft link to learn how). A lot of it is just getting used to changing the language bar on your computer from EN to HE and back again. I did the XP set up a while back; my son and I did the Vista set up for Hebrew recently, and it was REALLY easy. He’s my resident typing in Hebrew expert; he recently submitted a book report totally typed in Hebrew.

Received in one of my Yahoo groups this morning:
http://www.learn-hebrew.co.il/videos/index.html

Learn Hebrew is a free, on-line, educational resource
to learn Hebrew words. The flash site incorporates
46 topics, along with over 1,700 Hebrew words and
phrases. Each Hebrew word is presented as an image
with nikud [vowels]. When you click on a word or phrase
you can hear it spoken. The high quality audio
was created in a sound studio.

The email was from Jacb Richman. Thanks, Jacob!

 See all my posts about learning Hebrew.

Gail of Rubicon 3 and Shira are both learning Hebrew. So I thought I would help them out by posting my five-year-old daughter’s Hebrew homework. She answered one already, drawing a line from the “kos” to the cup, but we haven’t managed to coerce her into doing any more (when do you force a kid?):

Hints: A tamar, which is also a name, means date. Yonah or Jonah has a nickname.

If anyone wants the answers, I’ll put them in the comments. If you already know Hebrew, feel free to put a joke in the comments instead. Jokes always appreciated.

My daughter has been struggling this year to learn her alefbet. No, no, I’ve got it wrong. We have been struggling this year to get her to learn her alefbet.

Somewhere I saw a lecture: “Learn to write before you learn to read.” Now, that is what I have been trying to tell her teacher! If she could get the kids to at least learn to write their names in Hebrew, it will help with letter recognition (that is how she is taught in her English class).

Finally, she has learned alef. It helps that is the first letter of her name. Here’s a little of the process of learning to write a “print-style” alef. First, what direction does the slant go in? Does it look like this:

or like this:

Then, she needs to add those little lines to it. The ones that come out of the bigger slant. An early alef of hers looked like this:

For those of you that don’t know Hebrew, the above is NOT an alef.

Meanwhile, the alefs that she sees often have a fanciness to them, such as the one I have in the upper corner of this post. So sometimes she spends time embellishing her written letters, because that is what she sees.

Lately, her alef has looked a bit like an X. I guess that’s close.

Lucky for her, her second language doesn’t have to be Farsi. We had a guest speaker come talk to us about Farsi on Sunday. But that is a subject for another post.