Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Pimsleuring along

It's May 6, and I'm in lesson 6 of Pimsleur. I'm right on schedule, but barely...
Not to brag, but it's rare that I need to go over a Pimsleur lesson more than once, and (if I have the time) can often do three or four in a day. I had some difficulty with a few lessons in Russian as well as the semi-confusing 4-segments-of-six-hours-each time counting system in Thai. Aside from that, I can usually get stuff sufficiently.
The first two or three lessons were great. The sounds aren't necessarily foreign. Between German and Russian, some of the more guttural or strange sounds aren't hard to make. I did two lessons on one day and none the next, but was still on schedule.
Until lesson 5. Yesterday. The first half of the lesson was all review; there wasn't even a new conversation (that I recall), but about fifteen minutes in, you get hit with streets and their names, squares and their names, the verbs for "to eat", "to drink" and "to know." I don't recall if it's in 5 or 6, but they also tack on "to want" and some question words "when", "where." There are a few more concepts they add, and before then, it seemed like it was all according to the regular Pimsleur script (which it feels like I've done a billion times now), but it feels now like I'm moving at breakneck speed. I think I know why.
Hebrew (like Arabic), as one of my HebEx companions put it, is "obscenely" gender-specific. Whereas in Chinese (what I'm used to by now) doesn't have ANY gender, Hebrew specifies male and female in both pronouns and verbs themselves; the effect is learning TWO sets of vocabulary.
"Now," you might say, "I only need to learn my own gender's grammar since I will only be using that form of speech." This IS the case in Thai (with gender-specific polite particles to end your sentences) or in Russian, but in Hebrew, you also consider the gender of the person to whom you are speaking when you speak, so yeah, if you think you might ever speak to anyone of the opposite sex, you're learning two forms of a lot of vocabulary. That's how it seems now anyway...
Going to go over lesson 6 again before the day is over. Oof.

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