I'm doneeeeeeee!

Hey all!

Just realised that I completely forgot to blog last week. Oopsie daiseis =P

Anyway, I'm completely done with my course! Like completely! Like fully! Like yeah! Haha we just had our final exam this morning, welcomed in the Shabbat as per normal, and now I'm at the airport chilling forrrrrrr another 10 more hours now! =P And I'm hungry and there's almost nothing open due to it being Shabbat (was prepared for every Shabbat except this one =P=P). There's a couple of other guys with me, so it's not too bad, but still gonna be a bit of a wait. Not to mention the next 5 hour wait I'll have in Istanbul, possibly without internet connection =P. So might as well do this now haha. You can totally expect a not-so-long post here =P=P.

So yeah I'm done with the Genesis course! I'll probably back up a little more to describe the entire course in a moment, but just at this point =P. It's kinda mixed feelings at this point haha. First off, I am VERY glad to be heading back, and there's so much stuff back home that I'm missing HEAPS (and no, the top one isn't gaming, or even my instruments =P=P). I'm also glad it's over just because around the end, we could just feel the long-term fatigue setting in from doing an intensive course for a full 6 weeks. But at the same time, I'm kinda sad to leave behind what was an AWESOME experience, just when I was getting to a stage where I could really start feeling the language. But undoubtedly, it HAS been an awesome time over here, and it's certainly been my best birthday present ever from my parents (along with being the most expensive >_>) and I think it'll be for a while. There's just so much I've gotten out of it that I literally couldn't have gotten anywhere else in the world, and I trust that God will continue to build it up in me, even though I'm not immersing myself into the language intensively anymore.

So what can I officially do now that I've finished this 6 weeks? I can read the entire book of Jonah, the first 3 chapters of Genesis, and the 10 commandments in biblical Hebrew with pretty good understanding. We've also done Psalm 8, but... it's still gonna take me a while to get a grasp of the vocabulary and the sentence structures. But we officially did look at it and read it! =P But apart from that (oh and Jonah 2 is a lil weird too) I can actually read all those with pretty good understanding. And really now the main thing I have to work on is just the vocabulary. As just about every one of you probably knows, my memory... is not the best in the world =P. But yeah that's the thing I struggled with a lot in the course (just about every error I made in the final exam was a vocab issue =P). And I can essentially read out any part of the old testament (that's in Hebrew, anyway =P). Might not necessarily know what it means, but I can do it =P. But even so, I'm realising that I recognise a lot of words just when reading a few 'random' texts out of the Torah. And that....... yeah it's a little cool =P. Like OHMYGOODNESSIACTUALLYUNDERSTANDWHAT'SGOINGON kinda cool =P. Just a little =P.

Haha so now that I've finished the course, I'm gonna try and look back and trace my progress. Cos let me tell you, even into the 3rd week or so, I'd NEVER have imagined that I'm where I am now. Some of this will be repetition of previous stuff but hey. I have time. I need to kill time. Deal with it =P.

Week 1:
This was all about getting used to hearing the language. Essentially, they commanded us to get up, and we got up. They commanded us to jump, and we jumped. They commanded us to fly, and we flew. They commanded us to hit the other teacher with a sword, and we did that willingly =P. In this way we built up a basic vocabulary and just began to get an ear for how Hebrew words sounded. Around the end they also started introducing the present and past tense (again, all just by listening to commands and listening to what they said while we were performing the commands). At this stage, we also started learning the alphabet. We were essentially saying nothing this entire week. The only real time we got to speak was right at the end, when we (the students) got to give the teachers commands, and they had to do it. Ahhhh that was good fun =P.

Week 2
Here we started reading the book of Jonah. Very very slowly - around 1-2 verses at a time. Even then, it was incredible - I could already understand most of the stuff right from the start! I was totally not expecting that to happen so soon. We also did some basic verb things (like tenses and that kinda thing) and it quickly moved to more complex verb things. New vocabulary was learned by the same method as before - acted out by the teachers and sometimes commanding us to do the same action. And while we continued to build a foundation of vocabulary and grammar, we just continued to read through the book of Jonah.

Week 3
More of the same, more of the same. Except the sheer amount of vocabulary we learnt went up, and we needed to learn it faster. We had started reading around 1-2 verses a day, and by this week we were reading like 6-7 verses a day. We didn't do a huge lot of acting out past just acting out a new word for the purposes of... well, learning the new word =P. I believe at this point we started learning the different categories of verbs (the verb patterns), but I can't quite remember if that was in week 3 or 4. I think we did have the weekend to work on that. But by this point, we had pretty much already covered most of the verb 'theory' just by using a whole lot of verbs that we'd learned beforehand.

Week 4
So at this point, we had three days left and the whole of chapter 2 and 4 to cover before the review and exam. And so I was like 'yeah right, as if we can finish this on time' =P. Well, apparently we could, simply by doing half of chapter 4 per day and running through the entire chapter 2 as a class together. Yes, it was intense, but we did it! =P Considering we went from 1-2 verses a day to half a chapter a day... yeah that's a fair amount of progress =P. And there was even more vocabulary to learn - quite a lot in fact. We also tied up all the stuff about grammar and verbs which we'd learnt so far. And we reviewed the entire Jonah for the exam, and... we sat the exam! Haha I did a LOT better than I expected (my paper was littered with annotations saying stuff like 'I have no idea what this actually is, but it sounds like it should be that....' =P. Hahaha good fun.

Okay running out of time, I'll finish this up later =P