One of the things I made reference to earlier was Parkinson's Law, which states:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
This brings up issues of goals, procrastination, motivation, determination and the like. Even with a task one would like to complete, without structure, it can be difficult to do. So we're adding some structure (and mishegas [okay, it's Yiddish]) to our approach to Hebrew. A blitz attack can sometimes be inspiring and frantic enough to be productive. We'll discuss advantages to this approach later.
In short, though, the Hebrew Experiment is an attempt to become as fluent as possible in Modern Hebrew in 60 days, using Pimsleur's first two Hebrew courses as a basis for study, and supplementing it with anything else we can get our hands on. Aside from Pimsleur as the constant with the three of us, we are all taking our own approach to what we learn and how. With only 60 days to get as far as we can, we certainly won't be fluent, but I expect enormous strides to be made. Again, more later about the benefits to this approach.
I skimmed over a few online message boards and blogs where people discussed their experience with the language. They ranged from people studying/working in Israel to people whose in-laws only spoke Hebrew to people who were ethnically Jewish and were exposed to the language from a young age. The shortest time in which someone claimed to be "fluent" [which is the vaguest of benchmarks] was about a year (a woman whose in-laws spoke only Hebrew), and she claimed to think in it. A gentleman in Israel said he'd been there about two and a half years and his Hebrew was only passable.
We picked Hebrew for a number of reasons; these will be discussed later, but suffice it to say that it's not an easy language. It certainly doesn't lend itself to be learned easily by native speakers of any language that isn't Semitic.
So there you have it.
Modern Hebrew
60 Days
60 Pimsleur lessons (half hour each = 30 hours of "instruction")
and whatever else we can get our hands on
Begins May 1, 2010.
I wish I were hardcore enough to do a different pimsleur lesson everday. I just don't feel like I've learned all there is only going through it once. Is this just me?
ReplyDeleteThey say at the end of the first few lessons that if you've "mastered" about 80% of the material, then that's sufficient to continue. I don't so much worry about accent, per se, but I rarely have to re-listen to a lesson. I might forge ahead somewhat haphazardly, but I feel I 'get it' a few minutes into the following lesson. Maybe the method takes some getting used to.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first started with Pimsleur, I had a more perfectionistic approach to the lessons. I did them sometimes two or three times before moving on. I was obsessive about accent and complete accuracy. However, I learned once you get that 80% you really should move on, because the timed reviews will tie up the loose ends. When I get obsessive during this experiment (because I know I will have those days), I'm going to try to do the same lesson more than once on the same day. We'll see...
ReplyDeleteHa! I think I'm going to do the exact opposite. My Pimsleur attention span comes and goes. It was at a low with Italian, but sometimes... for a few weeks or so, I can do four or five lessons a day, but I definitely want to start with 2 a day or so at the beginning to prevent getting behind.
ReplyDelete