me in Chicago instead of Israel (was Re: Succos)

cindys wrote:
> "Ken Bloom" <kabloom@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:di6pf7$j2l$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
>>(I really should get the Sefer Yalkut Yosef Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, so
>>that I can know what Rav Ovadia says with regard to matters like
>>these. I think my Hebrew is good enough now that I can understand it
>>in most cases.)
>
> ------------
> Thank you for this information. What did you do to reach your present
> fluency in Hebrew? (I have in the back of my mind that you spent time in a
> yeshiva in Israel, but now, I don't remember).

Actually, I may have stated my fluency more optimistically than I
actually feel about it, although others who I am studying torah with
recently are generally more optimistic about my fluency than I am. In
any event, I am certainly at the point where I can learn something from
having a sefer entirely in hebrew. Some of that "something" will be the
language itself, as I won't be able to take the easy way out of learning
the language by just looking at the English translation on the facing page.

I took two quarters of Hebrew at UC Davis before it stopped fitting in
my schedule, and since I daven every day and study torah, I've been able
to learn more hebrew by using Hebrew-English translated books. A
relatively literal translation like ArtScroll goes a long way toward
learning the language just by jumping back and forth between the pages
and knowing which word matches up with which. One thing I really need to
do is start trying to speak hebrew to the israelis at my synagogue (and
there sure are a lot of them), no matter how bad my hebrew is and no
matter how difficult it will be for me to say what I want to say. I'm
kind of scared to do that though, for some reason that I can't identify.

I haven't spent time in a yeshiva in Israel. I had been looking at doing
that this year, but also hedging my bets by applying to graduate school.
In the end, I reached the point where I had to decide between graduate
school and yeshiva, and I concluded that I did not have enough money to
pay for what I would need to pay right away for a year in Israel.

In case you missed any previous posting I've made to this effect, I'm
now living in Chicago (where I have been for about 6 weeks), and I go to
Illinois Institute of Technology where have a research fellowship. I'm
doing research in Shlomo's Linguistic Cognition Lab, where we try to get
computers to understand English for various applications. Shlomo tells
me that it's good to learn more languages becuase it opens the mind. And
it's probably also good to do in my particular specialization of research.

(As an aside, my father told me that learning additional languages used
to be a requirement of a PhD, but that the requirement has mostly been
dropped.)

(As an aside to that aside, did you know there's a word for people who
speak three languages? It's "trilingual". Similarly, the word for people
who speek two languages is "bilingual". There's also a word for people
who speak one language: "American".)

Apart from Shlomo, I haven't met any of the other SCJMmers in Chicago.
Shlomo told me that Lisa lives here, and apparently judging by his posts
in the "High Holiday Tickets" thread, Omega does also.

Last time I posted about my being in Chicago, I decided not to ask for
an SCJM meetup, because the purpose of that trip was to look for a place
to live, and in any event I'd be moving here just a couple weeks later.
Now that I actually live here, anyone want to do a Chicago SCJM meetup?

--Ken Bloom

--
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