Shalom friends! I am jumping forward from the last post. I welcome you to read the prior one in its entirety. Our first practical step was that you start learning ONLY 3 words per day. Sounds like an incredibly low number, but I’ve seen time and time again with real, live students that they get overwhelmed emotionally at the thought of being crushed by words. In this post I’d like to suggest an answer to the question: Which words should I learn? My answer to the question is that you should have two word lists in your pocket. List one is the words that you need/needed today, and list two comprises all the words that you heard/saw/read that you would like to know. The second set of words proves it self to be not urgent, by virtue of the fact that you didn’t need the word today.
When we look at list 1 we focus only on three words/day for the entire first month of our program. I emphasize that this approach is only going to sound reasonable to someone who’s into learning Hebrew for the long run. What’s the long run? By my subjective standards it’s 6 months and beyond. (This probably on the spot excludes anyone who is in Israel- by definition the worlds largest ulpan.) All the other people who are reading this can breathe a sigh of relief, that thank G-d you don’t need Hebrew today. On the other hand if you can do a 30 day program (I actually prefer one day totally off/week) you will see that a change takes place in you over that first month.
The change is that you’ve developed a receptivity to the Hebrew language, which will now allow you to build with greater relative ease. More on this, and on the general subject in the upcoming post.