It is no wonder why we in the Finnish language have the saying ”it's all Hebrew to me”, meaning when you simply don't understand anything. The English speaking world doesn't know what they're saying when it's all Greek to them. I know how to speak, read and write Greek, but it's the Hebrew cat that got my tongue.
Visiting Israel is in one aspect like
going back to those childhood times when you couldn't read. Remember? Flipping through just the illustrations in a comic book, or not fully being able
to follow a super-interesting American movie because of the subtitles? The
Hebrew alphabet will make you feel like that again. It made me illiterate - literally.
Fine, I'll be honest. I haven't
actually taken a Hebrew course (yet?) and just studied the alphabet
from a cheap postcard I bought in Eilat. But unlike Greek or even
Russian, there are no safe havens in the Hebrew selection of letters
since none of them are the same as in the Latin alphabet. There's nothing to begin guessing with.
I wouldn't know even where to start
reading – it goes from right to left, combinations of letters can
mean different things than they actually seem, and sometimes even the
Israelis themselves guess how something they read is pronounced. And numbers you do read from left to right, if I have understood correctly.
So, what does this leave me with? As I've only managed to memorize alef and shin, for
the time being, I will leave the reading and writing and concentrate
on the talking part. There's a bigger chance your message will go
through to the Israelis anyway if you open your mouth (and be loud), lo?
Guess which one of the letters I named "the broken Menorah"?
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