Vocabulary
Free Hebrew lessons – October 2010 – Training – Day 41
Shalom ^averim (hello friends),
In our previous lessons we learned some new verbs and short sentences like “what are you doing?”, “I’m eating,” “what happened?” etc…
While I’m writing this lesson on Tuesday evening, my heart is in Chile. Within a few hours they will start the exciting operation of extricating the 33 trapped miners from a depth of about 700 meters under the ground. When you read this on Thursday I hope that everything is over, and the operation will have been a success.
After two “heavy” lessons, I want to give you a light lesson and to talk about the weather.
Today’s menu: Weather
Attention: The underlined letters represent the accent.
Summer
You say summer and I say kaits.
Last summer was very hot. We can see that year after year – the weather seems to get hotter. We can all help the quality of our environment by practicing being “green” – recycling, driving cars with lower emissions, etc.
* Quality of the environment – ei^ut ha’sviva, in Hebrew.
So, kaits has ended and autumn is here.
Autumn / Fall
For autumn we say stav.
Stav in Israel is very short. It only lasts about a month, or less.
I like this season (ona) because it’s not too hot and not too cold, you can breathe and feel alive.
The only problem here is that our government returned to standard time very early. That means it is dark here at 5 P.M…I don’t like that.
Winter
For winter we say ^oref.
When I was a child (kshe’haiti yeled), we had a lot of rain here during the ^oref. I remember we sailed paper ships in the puddles, or walked with boots, but today we only have a real ^oref maybe once in five years. It seems like we mostly have rainless years.
That’s bad, but any problem can also be an opportunity to invent and develop new ideas and technology.
Of course there are many ways to create water, like water desalination (hatpalat maim). Fifteen years ago I invented a way to make water from the air, but I found that someone invented that six months before me…
Spring
For spring we say aviv.
Aviv is the favorite season (ona) almost everywhere in the world.
As Passover symbolizes a beginning (the Exodus – yetsiat mitsraim, in Hebrew), and Aries is the first symbol of the Zodiac (galgal ha’mazalot), spring (ha’aviv) symbolizes a beginning… it is no wonder that they are both in the same season.
BTW, another name of Passover is ^ag ha’aviv (the holiday of the spring).
Weather
For weather we say mezeg avir.
In Hebrew, when a sentence has two nouns in close proximity, like “mezeg + avir,” and you want to emphasize “the weather,” you should use the “ha” sound before the second noun, like this “mezeg ha‘avir“, not “ha’mezeg avir“.
It looks like we’ve learned only 5 words today:
Kaits – summer
Stav – autumn
^oref – winter
Aviv – spring
Mezeg avir – weather
But we’ve learned more:
Ona – season
Ei^ut ha’sviva – quality of the environment
Kshe’haiti – when I was
Yeled – child
Hatpalat maim – water desalination… there’s one you won’t use very often. 😉
Yetsiat mitsraim – the Exodus
Galgal ha’mazalot – the Zodiac
^ag – holiday
That’s it. We talked about the four seasons we have in a year (shana), and you learned a little bit about mezeg ha’avir and seasons in Israel. I really hope you all get the chance to visit Israel one day – it is a beautiful country, with friendly people and plenty of history to see and study.
And one more thing before the end of this Hebrew lesson…
After our previous lesson I received three important comments by Bob, Judy and Conny on our Heblish Facebook group. I think that’s it’s a great way to learn more Hebrew. If you haven’t yet joined our Heblish group on Facebook, this is the time to do that.
Lehitraot in lesson 42…
