Spiky tree and honey B

First, I'm having trouble uploading photos to flickr because they exceed the file size, so please check out my facebook album to see what I saw yesterday.  And Dad, I'd really like your opinion on some of the photos.

The past few days have been both eventful and uneventful, insomuch as they've been packed with stuff to do but little to actually write about.  For the sake of open discourse, I'm happy to say that although my work in the garden is dirty and challenging, it's incredibly fulfilling.  Not only can I see the effect I am having on whichever space I work in, but I feel good at the end of the day (or rather, middle of the day, since I start at 6:00 am) knowing I have worked my body and muscles.  By the end of my time working in the garden, I suspect I will have arms of steel.  Tanned, of course.  Yes, be jealous O Frozen Ones of the Nort': I already have a tan line.

I've only had a week of classes and already I am learning bunches o' stuff.  In five days of class we have learned thirteen verbs, conjugated in all forms within the present tense.  We have learned numbers, letters, and days, a slew of miscellaneous nouns, adjectives, and prepositions, as well as a variety of phrases and questions.  I will undoubtedly have to devote a little more time to studying since I'm having trouble keeping it all in my head.

Yet perhaps the most interesting and unexpected thing I have discovered in the last week (other than the spiky tree) is how differently people learn, hear, and speak a language depending on their country of origin.  Hebrew is a very guttural language with little definition of consonants at the anterior of the mouth.  The /r/ sound is rolled in the back of the throat, where one also finds the /ch/ (found in "Chanukah").  But even the vowels and other consonants are kept well within the recesses of the mouth, which somehow ads to the Israeli "Go with the flow, b'seder" philosophy.  Why expel greater energy to move your lips when you can get your point across anyway?

You'd think this would be a very easy accent to master, but no, not so.  There are some who try hard to learn the how as well as the what of the language, but then there are others.  There are the unquestionable American students, somewhat presumptuous and only a little ethnocentric, at times unwilling to adapt to this culture's practices.  You can hear it in the Hebrew with an American accent, hard /r/s at the front of the mouth, the over-exaggerated vowels, the unnecessarily crisp consonants - the biting /t/, whistling /s/, /l/ touching the teeth.  These are all things I expected to hear, but aside from the challenges posed by /ch/ and the rolled uvular /r/ I expected the rest to be easy to emulate.

Apparently, however, other languages with other accents have their own problems.  I was utterly astonished when, on the first day, I discovered that many Spanish-speaking students had a lot of trouble saying the /v/ sound found in Hebrew (despite the fact that Spanish uses the sound - or so I thought).  And in French, the /r/ is guttural, so it is very often confused for the Hebrew /ch/.  But of course, if you are francophone and you know there is an /r/ in a word, you'll pronounce it like your own /r/.  Which means that a word like chadar ochel can end up sounding like chadachochel.

Each language's phonetic transliteration of Hebrew is also different.  The German girl to one side writes "w" for /v/ sounds, while the francophone to my left uses "ch" for /sh/ sounds, thereby making it impossible for the teacher to use phonetic transliteration while the class is still learning the aleph bet.

It astounds me how what you speak can influence what you hear.  Sure, each person may have the same sound waves entering their ears, but how they interpret the sounds may differ greatly depending on what associations they have.  And of course, learning something new always starts with associations to what is familiar.

Having taken a class in French phonetics, I enjoy listening to linguistic sounds, determining exactly where in the mouth it is formed and with what means.  Doesn't mean I can repeat it in my own mouth, but knowing is at least a step in the right direction.  Which reminds me:

Personal Ulpan Goal #64: Learn how to speak with a uvular rolled /r/

(Don't ask me what the other 63 are.  I wouldn't know.)