Shalom!

Day 9 and only six weeks until spring…

In our two previous lessons we talked about the conjunctions “and,” (ve) and “the” (ha). We learned how to say “for,” “for me,” “for him” and “for her” (bishvil, bishvili, bishvilo and bishvila), and we also learned some words about food.

The goal of this course is not to teach you mountains of words, but the main conjunctions and some useful terms for a simple day in Israel. You won’t be a politician or a writer after this course, but hopefully you will be able to speak Hebrew well enough for the needs of your stay in Israel.

If you don’t remember the sound of the symbol (^), go back to lesson 6, read the explanation and listen to the videos. You won’t be able to learn Heblish without listening to the videos of lessons 4, 5 and 6.
Those lessons are a must!

Today we have an interesting but complex lesson…

Today’s menu: One (masculine), I, I want, I see and I understand

Attention: The underlined letters under a Heblish word represent the accent.

One (masculine)

One fish – dag e^ad.
In English you say “I ate ONE fish” but in Hebrew we say “I ate fish ONE”.  (I ate dag e^ad). One (e^ad) has an unusual usage in the structure of the Hebrew sentence… it comes after the noun.

Examples:
   – For me one fish – bishvili dag e^ad.
   – There is only one cat around the aquarium – There is only ^atul e^ad around the aquarium.  

Since fish is a masculine word in Hebrew, we say: dag e^ad. The feminine numbers are different, but today we are only going to learn this.

I

It won’t be easy, so stay focused.

In English you have three different words for talking about yourself: “I, me” and “myself.”
In Hebrew it is more complex and we’ll do it step by step, lesson after lesson.

In our previous lesson (Lesson 8) you saw one usage of “I” (me) when we learned that “for” is “bishvil” and “for me” is ” bishvili.“  By adding just the “i” vowel at the end of the word, it changes to “for me.”

Today we’ll learn about “I” (as simply, “I”).
The Hebrew word for “I” is “ani.”
Ani is the word for “I” whether you are a man or a woman; the gender difference will be in the word following “ani.”  We can see that in the next example.

I want

You say “I want” and I say “ani rotse” – this is because I’m a man, but a woman should say “ani rotsa“.

Most of you are women, so “feminine” will always come before “masculine” in our lessons. Look at the following table.

              English                                                           Heblish

Hey, sorry about the noisy radio in the background of the videos. I was concentrating so hard on the words of the lesson that I didn’t even realize it was on.
Listen to this video “Ani rotse” (22 seconds on YouTube).

I see

In English, you sometimes
say “I see” to also indicate “I understand,” but you can’t use those terms interchangeably in Hebrew.
In Hebrew, “to see” is what you do with your eyes… see, that’s all.

              English                                                           Heblish

Hmmm… two vowels together… how should you say it? Listen to this video “Ani roe” (23 seconds on YouTube).

I understand

And finally, here is how you would say “I understand” in Heblish.

              English                                                           Heblish

I enjoyed the lesson. I hope you did, too…

Lehitraot in Lesson 10