One of the highlights of writing this monthly article is that I get to connect with wonderful parents, grandparents, and teachers in our community who come over to discuss some of the ideas I have shared. I recently wrote an article about the importance of teaching vocabulary in Limudei Kodesh and had some fascinating conversations on the topic of Hebrew language learning. I’d like to share some of my thoughts to include all of you in the ongoing discussion.
Many of us have had the same question: How come students who have spent 12 years in a yeshiva cannot speak Hebrew fluently? While I cannot impart any scientific research on this question, I can share some experiences that have helped me understand the issue.
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When I graduated from high school, I couldn’t hold a conversation, in Hebrew. I went to seminary in Israel, where a good number of the shiurim were in Hebrew, and I still couldn’t speak. I lived in the country after marriage and happily relied on my husband or my broken Hebrew to get by. Today, though, I speak in Hebrew with Israelis and listen to shiurim online by Israeli rabbanim.
What changed was a babysitter named Zehava. When I brought her my only precious baby after I took my first teaching job, Zehava indicated that she couldn’t understand what I was saying as she was an Israeli immigrant. I quickly learned how to say diapers, formula, and nap in Hebrew and got my first Hebrew sentences out. After some time, we started to shmooze about my day and hers, in Hebrew. I got better and better until I felt comfortable carrying on a conversation with her sister who came to visit. One day, over a year later, I was there when another mother picked up her child and she and Zehava started speaking in English. I was incredulous. “Zehava! I thought you couldn’t speak English?!”
She told me, “What kind of Limudei Kodesh teacher would you be if you couldn’t speak Hebrew? You needed to learn!” And that is how I came to learn to speak Hebrew.
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Learning a modern language requires natural and authentic input and output. To understand, students need to read and hear the language from real sources. To speak and write, they need to speak and write. Like riding a bike, you can’t learn the skill by reading about bike riding or watching others. You have to do it yourself. And if you wait until you are perfect to start, or want to get the technique just so, you will never improve. You need to practice, practice, practice, with no thought, at the beginning, of how poorly you are doing.
This is easier said than done. No one likes to look foolish. When I first started teaching, it was like pulling teeth to get a student to practice speaking in front of the class. Nowadays, things have improved. First, many teachers know that it is practice and not perfection that is important so they make their classroom a comfortable place for students to experiment. Second, the curricula and books encourage speaking together as one group or privately to bypass this concern. Finally, there are many easily accessible tools to help students avoid discomfort. Students can record themselves speaking and send it to the teacher. They get to practice as I did with Zehava with no chance of embarrassment.
There is another reason why our students often fall behind. A good friend of mine who is an Ivrit teacher mentioned that her young students were struggling when writing Hebrew paragraphs. Everyone ended up frustrated: the teacher, the students, and the parents. I gave her some advice that was a lifesaver for me and that she also found helpful: Always look at the General Studies grammar and writing workbooks for your grade and for the grade below before assigning anything in Hebrew or in Limudei Kodesh.
You would be amazed at how slowly students learn the grammar rules we take for granted. If students aren’t learning a grammar rule in English class, then we are doing double duty by teaching them these rules and skills in Hebrew or Chumash.
For example, in second grade, students are first learning to construct a few sentences that tell a story. In second grade Hebrew, it’s safe to ask students to write individual sentences. Wait until the third or fourth before asking students to write a Hebrew paragraph. Students in third grade don’t learn how to use all the English subject and object pronouns, yet we spend a lot of time drilling them with these pronouns in Hebrew.
In middle school, English teachers spend all year teaching students to write basic essays. Read them: Literary best sellers they are not. Lower the expectations so students can write on their level. If students feel like they can’t write or speak and give up, it may be because we are asking them to do something that they cannot do even in their native language.
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So why doesn’t learning Chumash or Navi translate into speaking or writing in Hebrew? After all, aren’t the shorashim (word roots) the same? A few years ago, I learned the difference firsthand. For one year, I worked in an elite public high school supporting teachers integrating technology into their curriculum. Part of my job required me to understand the goals of each teacher.
This particular school required a foreign language elective. Students could take French, Spanish, German, or Latin. They started learning the language in fifth grade and were fluent by high school. The chair of the languages department was a Jewish man who taught Latin. We shared a love of Hebrew, and we spent time discussing language learning. He explained how he formulated the Latin and the other foreign language curriculum and gave me his materials to learn from.
When I examined the Latin worksheets, they were very different from those in the other classes. In Latin class, the students took a lot of written quizzes every few days, where they needed to conjugate different verb roots in past, present, and future tense. Their quizzes brought back flashbacks of the many avar, hoveh and asid (past, present, and future) quizzes I took in high school. They had long lists of verb roots to memorize. They had worksheets with hard words to help them translate the Latin text. I had been so judgmental of these very techniques when I learned Chumash and had thought they were outdated, and here they were considered best practice in this very academic public school
By contrast, in modern languages, the teachers had the students listening and reading far easier modern texts that were interesting. They required students to write sentences and to speak. The goal of Latin class was to teach students to understand complex texts written in a language that they would never speak or hear, while the goal of the modern language classes was to enable students to communicate with other people.
This experience taught me a lesson. Just as students learn Latin differently from modern French because the learning goals are different, lehavdil, learning Chumash and learning spoken Ivrit have different goals and might as well be different languages for kids. We would never expect an English language learner to learn to speak by reading Shakespearean English. Nor would we think any native-born American student could navigate Shakespeare without teacher guidance and support. No one speaks the Chumash’s lashon hakodesh. When was the last time you met anyone who uses the vav hahipuch? I cannot assume that just because a child understands a pasuk in Chumash, he or she can use the words later to speak. Just because children can describe their classroom in Hebrew doesn’t mean they don’t need to learn to conjugate verbs so they can understand Chumash. While a few rare students might be able to transfer their learning from one realm to another, we cannot assume it will happen.
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There is an important rule in all education: Assumptions are dangerous. I can never assume students should know something, whether it is academic, social, or behavioral. If something needs to be learned, it needs to be taught explicitly and systematically.
In a yeshiva day school, the time necessary to teach the amount of material our children need to learn far exceeds the time allotted in the day. We want our children to be able to learn Torah on high levels. They need to develop yiras Shamayim, bitachon, and derech eretz, and learn how to lead Torah lives. Each of these areas requires time to teach. If one of our goals is that students should be able to read and speak Hebrew, then this too needs to be done intelligently, without assuming it will happen during all the other learning. If it is not happening, it is because other skills and behaviors are taking precedence.
To teach our students to communicate in Hebrew, we need to teach them to transfer their Chumash skills to Ivrit by using those words to speak and write. We need to make it safe to practice, practice, practice, so that children develop the ability to speak. And we need to make sure we are teaching these skills at a developmentally appropriate level. Aim high, but be realistic.
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I am very grateful that Zahava got me to speak Hebrew. My life has been enriched by my conversations with Israeli speakers. Whenever I have the chance, I continue to speak with Israelis to improve my speaking ability. I am hopeful that when I am in Israel, I will be better able to communicate. Moreover, I appreciate being able to learn the Torah that comes out of Eretz Yisrael as it is so much more vibrant than when it is translated into English; there is such a richness and depth to the Torah available in modern Hebrew that does not come through in English.
Most importantly, my experiences have taught me how complex it is to teach our children everything we hope they should know. Instead of asking, “How come students don’t know more,” I have learned to be astounded by what they do know and to say todah to those who work for them to learn more.
