Tuesday, August 21, 2007

If I were a Hebrew teacher...

Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum!

Seriously, though, if I was a Hebrew teacher, I would teach mnemonic tricks to my students to help them memorize unfamiliar vocabulary, and encourage them to come up with their own tricks, perhaps holding contests for a few points extra credit each week if they could come up with really memorable ways to remember vocab items from the week. For example, you can remember the following words the following ways --

dag = "fish" -- dogfish!

yam = "sea/west" -- the potato was brought in over the sea from the western hemisphere!

My favorite one I came up with, though, is this one --

yrsh ("sh" as in "shiver", not two separate letters as in "Soho") = "inherit" -- "Shon, the family wine shellar ish yoursh!"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My first Hebrew teacher was spectacularly good at using catchy Hebrew songs to teach grammar. I still remember learning how to conjugate a I-Nun verb with LO YISA GOY EL GOY HEREB....

el blogador said...

Since I'm teaching myself Hebrew, there's no songs for me, though I occasionally when I'm studying I hum to myself the theme to "Yentl". It's not much help at anything, but it's kind of fun.