If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?
I was trying to brush up on my Russian, when I discovered a website called Foreigncy. It’s “a one-of-a-kind language training system for advanced level students and language professionals.” They currently have Russian, Arabic, and Hebrew available for English natives. (It looks like they used to have Persian, Urdu and Mandarin, but they haven’t been updated for a couple years.)
Users go through a three-step process: first, you’re given an English language summary of the foreign news article. Then, you’re given a set of vocab lists, flashcards and quizzes to prepare you for the vocab in the article. Finally, once you feel you have familiarised yourself with the vocabulary and the subject matter, they send you to a real-life news article.
Let me know what you think of this resource! Happy learning!
This is my rendition of Psalm 131, which is probably my favorite psalm. Often, I cleave closely to the Hebrew text; other times, especially in the final couplet, I interpret it more loosely. A more “literal” translation is at the end of my post, after the cut.
I love this psalm because it embodies an almost Buddhist sense of peace through renunciation of desire. Envisioning our personal energy as something we cradle like a child, a child who no longer needs us but still seeks comfort in our touch, is a powerful metaphor. The final couplet returns to a pious theology in the original psalm (some have called it a later addition), but my translation renders it more universally.
—
(a David song / upward-reaching)
God-Who-Is, my heart has not been haughty, nor my eyes too lofty for their place. I have chosen not to chase mirages, dreams that towered taller than my reach. No — I have soothed and hushed my restless spirit, like a sated child on its mother — like a sated child, so my spirit rests on me.
(yet the hope that animates my people swells in me, a song that will not die)
—
Notes below the cut:
“God-Who-Is” — Literally YHWH, the personal name of the Israelite god. Exodus 3:14 offers an etymology of this name when God identifies himself as “I AM” (Hebrew EHYH).
“spirit” — Many translators render this as “soul,” but the Hebrew Bible doesn’t really have a conception of the soul as Christianity would envision it — no dualism here. Robert Alter goes in the opposite direction and renders it “myself,” which is fine in some contexts, but creates an odd image here of “myself rests on me.” The Hebrew word, nephesh, comes from the word for the throat or breath, and it roughly means “the living vitality within me.”
“a sated child” — Literally “a weaned child,” a child who no longer needs breast-feeding.
“the hope that animates my people” — In Hebrew, “to wait” and “to hope” are often the same verb. So while the original literally says to “wait for YHWH,” it carries the implication of hopeful, expectant waiting.
—
A more literal rendition:
(A song of ascents. Of David.)
YHWH, my heart has not been haughty, and my eyes are not raised up. I have not gone after anything too great or too marvelous for me. Rather, I have soothed and quieted my spirit, like a weaned child upon his mother. Like a weaned child upon me is my spirit.
Wait, o Israel, for YHWH: from now and forever more.
Hebrew: ‘This one verb is used to mean 10 different things, I’m an economical language like that, good luck figuring out what this verb means each time’
Also Hebrew: *Has about 8 different words meaning 'lion’*
I feel like every single person deserves to read OP’s tags cause fuck they are accurate.
Also like…
Hebrew: every single word is heavily gendered and there are Very Strict Rules for gendering every word and number and shit
Also Hebrew: these words SOUND like they’re female words, you will gender them like female words, and you will be WRONG.
Also also Hebrew: except for knives and the sun. These two can be whatever gender you like. And everyone will argue because they’re sure only their gendering is right.
I read “lingshaming” as “lionshaming” at first and lol. mood.
From the Catholics that I dealt with in the past, I’ve noticed their hatred towards the Jews. They blame the Jews for the death of Jesus and they demand that Jews should apologize for his death.
As a real Christian, I don’t blame the Jews at all for the death of Jesus. I blame Judas. I have nothing but love & respect for the Jewish community. They have nothing to apologize for. Jesus dying on the Cross was supposed to happen.
There’s also weird conspiracy theories that these Catholics beLIEve about the Jews, such as drinking the blood of Christian children and that synagogues have some sort of torture chamber beneath the synagogue.
Neither conspiracy theories have been proven. Yet they are still pushing these lies about the Jewish religion to this very day. Catholics are very hateful against the Jews and it doesn’t help that some movies about Jesus portrays Jews in a negative light.
There’s even a Catholic who hates The Ten Commandments movie. A movie loved by the Jewish community. I too love that movie and I’m not even Jewish. I think Catholics need to stop hating the Jewish community.
Hate is evil, hate is a sin. Instead of hate, we should love. Instead of being evil, we should be good to each other. Peace be with you.
“Palestine” is the only “country” in human history that claims to be “occupied” although it never existed in the first place as anything else but a distorted Roman label for occupied JUDEA.
Just like Disneyland, Arab “Palestine” is a fantasy but with far more lethal rides.
Best known for her performances in the original Broadway run of Rent, the television series Glee, and the Disney animated film Frozen, Idina Menzel is an amazing actress and singer and Jewish to boot. Here’s how we know:
-Idina’s family is of Russian and Eastern European Jewish background. [x]
-Idina attended Hebrew school, but ultimately dropped out before she finished prepping for her bat mitzvah (but not before getting her haftarah down!). [x]
-Idina has been known to sing in Hebrew, often in the form of her haftarah portion, at her concerts. [x]
-On raising her son and any possible future children, Idina says that she plans on raising them Jewish and with an awareness of Jewish history. She says that she feels a strong connection to Jewish culture. [x]
Got a Jewish fave you want us to spotlight? Suggest it through our askorsubmit box!
Due to covid and such, I decided to put together a workshop about tarot and Kabbalah. If you’re wondering about my studies, I am a pupil of Eduardo Madirolas, a very respected and graceful kabbalist of traditional Kabbalah and also of hermetic Qabala.
The Hebrew Letter HEH means ‘window’. It appears twice in the Tetragrammaton, Yah Heh Vav Heh. It is an aperture allowing light to shine in. It denotes oversight and rulership.
My last day at the @nli_israel archives… And what an incredibly beautiful and fascinating image to end with! This is from a bilingual prayer book published in 1883, with Hebrew on one page and Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic translation on the other. The editor even translated the shiviti, a traditional form of Jewish meditative art, so that “I have placed the L!RD’s presence before me always” becomes “ja'alat Allah liqbalati da'iman.” What an amazing time in Jerusalem… Many new friends and some great finds. Next stop: Tel Aviv!
In case y'all thought Hebrew was an easy language (Those tiny points around the letters appear only in children’s books btw)
those dots and dashes being the VOWELS, which only appear for children and language-learners
This seems like a good time to ask… why? Is there a reason why the vowels are omitted from most texts, given that there’s a system to indicate them? *curious*
Is this is unique to a certain language system? Tolkien’s made-up tengwar does a similar thing…
arabic does this too! i’ll let hebrew speakers explain theirs, but the explanation is simply that if you’re a fluent arabic speaker, the written forms and usage will provide the (non-textual) context that guides your pronunciation. what i mean by written forms for arabic is that every letter actually has a different morphology depending on their position in a word. kinda like… how… mm… the roman R in cursive changes forms depending on its position. tht helps a lot, i think. in any case, in regular practice, you do see the arabic vowel marks (depending on romanisation, is called harakah/harakat/harkat) appear regularly as a standard in quranic editions for non-arabic-using muslims. like, i grew up reading the ‘al-qur’an mashaf malaysia’ and thinking i was hot shit, and then i found my grandma’s pakistani one AND I DIED. lmao.
Semitic languages are like, reading: expert death mode.
The Hebrew vowels were only invented in the 8-9th century. There were a few versions vying for dominance. The Tiberias method won.
A Torah scroll is of course written with no vowels and no punctuation, as the traditional version was set long before these things were invented.
For the record, I have never once thought that Hebrew was an easy language.
as a jew i love having opinions on jesus. it’s like. no i don’t think he was messiah However Yes i am a fan of this dude. fucker said ‘it’s easier for a camel to go thru the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to go to heaven’ and proved his point by going absolutely ballistic flipping tables and chasing merchants with a whip in broad daylight in a synagogue. basically my thoughts on jesus are: 10/10 would go to brunch with.
