Learning Hebrew is hard, particularly if you are an English speaker living in Tel Aviv. The problem is that you can live completely in English in this city if you want to.
Most of your friends will be English speakers. They may be Israeli, French, American, English or Scandinavian, but chances are you will have a lot of friends that speak English fluently.
You’ll go to restaurants and cafes and be handed English menus, and your waiters will speak English.
You can go to concerts where the songs are in English. The theater will have English subtitles. You can watch a lot of TV in English, and films are in English. You can go to university in English.
But there are some problems with only speaking English in this city.
They start with the telephone.
The people that you telephone to sort out your phone bill or to pay your electricity bill will not speak English. The secretaries at your doctor’s office will rarely speak English. And these are all people that help you sort out your life in Israel, and it’s a huge problem when you are trying to live here. My inability to communicate with secretaries and service providers in Israel has left me terrified of having to call people up and try to speak Hebrew. But it also motivates me to learn more.
My friend told me the other day that she was talking to a private Hebrew teacher who asked what she wanted from learning Hebrew. She said, “I simply want to be able to pay my gas bill!”
There are lots of good reasons to put the effort into learning Hebrew, even if you are living in the English speakers’ haven of Tel Aviv. You will have more job opportunities, you will learn more about the Israeli culture, you will understand what is going on around you, and importantly, you will be able to deal with those service providers on the phone!
When I got to Israel I took an intensive Ulpan class. I went to every class, did my homework, but I didn’t speak that much, and without speaking I didn’t learn Hebrew that well. I got a job only in English and went to the Hebrew classes in the evening, but still I wasn’t practicing speaking, so again I didn’t get too far.
Learning Hebrew is so frustrating. One day you’re talking to all these people in Hebrew, and they understand you, and you understand them. Then the next moment you hear a word and you have no idea what it is, and then you lose the conversation topic completely, and then you stand there making a face at the person talking to you and thinking you’re stupid. It is just no fun at all.
My Israeli partner tried so many things to help me learn Hebrew. He translated songs for me, tried to speak Hebrew with me, and helped me with my homework. Then one day I came home and started finding little labels on objects all over the house – he’d spent hours making translation stickers and stuck them all over the house to help me.
Two years later, he has turned these original labels into a product – Stick Around. Stick Around is a box of 529 ready-to-peel stickers with the Hebrew and English word on them, e.g. chair | kise | כיסא. They are designed to be a fun way of increasing your Hebrew vocabulary, and to help you stick around, in Israel.
Stick Around is available online at www.gingerhood.com with free international shipping, and at the following stores:
- Bauhaus store, 99 Dizengoff, Tel Aviv
- Made in TLV, Hatachana – the new station compound, Tel Aviv
- Nisha – Jewish Gifts, 31 Derech Beit Lehem, Jerusalem
Jo’s top tips for fun ways to learn Hebrew
– watch a Hebrew TV series on TV or watch one online
– write a little diary each day saying what you did that day. Don’t try to write your deepest darkest thoughts, just start with a few sentences each day and see how you go
– read Hebrew out loud for 3 minutes every day, from a children’s book or the newspaper.
– find someone to do a language exchange with you. A lot of Israelis learned English at school but are a bit rusty after years of not using it, and are just waiting for a native English speaker to offer some conversation practice!
– get Stick Around – language stickers for your home and office, and Stick Around… in Israel!
Guest post by Jo Savill from Gingerhood.com