I Have Friends In Hebrew!!! 28/1/09

I have reached one of the most important milestones that a new immigrant to any place can reach. I have friends in Hebrew. They are real friends and not just people that I smile at during class while I sit alone too afraid and uncomfortably to really talk to. We hang out outside of class. We talk on the phone. We share things. We are real friends- and our only common language is not my mother tongue. It is relatively easy to reach a level of fluency where casual conversation with random people is possible or where grocery shopping isn’t a nightmare or where the bus drivers know what you are asking them. The next big step is being able to understand most of what you see or hear or read. That comes with a bit more effort and makes life so much easier. But to bridge the final gap that is more mental and cultural than anything else is where the real challenge lies.

Bar Ilan has a very large Anglo population. If I wanted, I could make a group of English speaking friends and only speak Hebrew in my actual classes. I speak English at home with David so there was no opportunity for me to practice before school started. Fortunately, I am in a department with no other native English speakers. There are some who were born here whose parents are American and who speak English fluently but they are Israeli’s and I didn’t realize they spoke English until months into the program. I entered a situation where it was either speak Hebrew or be lonely. I decided to just suck it up and speak Hebrew. It is such an amazing feeling when I realize that I spend entire days conversing and learning in the language that I have spent so much time and effort trying to learn. (Tip for potential Olim, Uplan is not a burden, it is the key to successful and easy absorption and it is a mistake to put it off.) I feel like I have really achieved something and I am so excited. My friends didn’t blink twice when they heard my accent or my sometimes halted speech. They just continued to talk to me as if nothing was strange. They correct me now and again for my benefit, but for the most part we have a completely normal relationship. It just makes me so happy and proud of myself. I no longer feel even a little bit left out of the world that I live in and now I really truly feel at home.

The only downside is that I am starting to lose my English. A friend told me that he heard that you can’t really learn a new language completely until you forget your mother tongue. Only then can you start to re-learn both languages at a truly fluent level. Well, I am at the stage of forgetting. Sometimes I can only think of a word in Hebrew and forget the English completely. The worst is when I know what I want to say but I can’t think of the exact word in either language. Then I feel completely lost. I am trying to keep up my reading in English but it only helps a little. David is useless in this matter because his English is much worse than mine and it is steadily declining the more he is in the army and has no opportunity to use English ever. Today I was giving a presentation on a paper I had written in Hebrew, but to be cute I wanted to say part of it in English since I had written about the US. In the middle I couldn’t think of a term and switched automatically back into Hebrew. It was really scary. I know that its just part of the normal process, but I hope that along with my gains in my new language my losses from my old won’t be too great.