Gay Guy in Seminary: Day 053 (Hebrew)

I have to lead with this because I can't believe I forgot to blog about it yesterday. I locked myself out of my apartment yesterday. Luckily, Amber was on her way over so we could hang out as we did homework. Normally, when I lock myself out of my apartment, I go to my neighbors Ryan and Sam who let me through their room so I can hop over the little divider between our balconies to go in through the back door, but neither one of them was home. As Amber and I stood their trying to figure out what to do, we noticed that the bathroom window was open, which is just under 7 feet from the floor. So, I gave Amber a boost, she went through the window, got onto the counter by the sink, hopped down and opened the door. Have I mentioned that I live on the fourth floor? Luckily, I don't think anyone saw us.


Today was our weekly dinner/Hebrew study night. Tom made moussaka, which is a Greek dish made with eggplant and lamb. It was very good, and he put up a valiant effort to try to get this complicated dish done before it got too late.


Here's Marlene asking Ben and Mike a question about Hebrew. Learning another language, especially one not based on the Roman alphabet, is not easy. You have to make up all kinds of weird sentences to remember what things are like "Have a taco" (thank you Ryan) to remember when to use a specific form of the definite article, or "If Alex Taveck is in front of you, then you are in the midst of Jeopardy" (thank you Tom) to remember that taveck means midst. One of my contributions was "If you go to Hawaii, they make a lei for you" to remember that le means to or for. Some other ones are "There's ganja in the garden", "Sad, eh? Go to the country!", "My ears ahz na as big as people say they are" and "I bought that Prius because when I had a Kia it sucked." The Hebrew pronunciation is in bold, the meanings are in italics bold. The crazier and weirder they are, the easier they are to remember. We're obviously not going for pronunciation accuracy here, it's just a tool to help us remember the grammar and vocabulary. As difficult as it is, it's actually a lot of fun when we all get together and try to come up with these funky ways of remembering things. It's not too bad right now, but we have a Hebrew intensive in January, which is three straight weeks of Hebrew for 4 hours a day. Hopefully, we'll all survive.