Why a group of Hebrew teachers decided to learn Russian

We had been teaching beginners for years. Then we decided to become beginners ourselves.

At the time, almost all the teachers at Ulpan Bayit were native Hebrew speakers. We knew how to explain the language. We knew the places where students tended to get stuck. But most of us could not remember what it felt like to meet the Hebrew alphabet for the first time. We had learned it as children.

After seeing a few students having a really difficult time in our Aleph classes, we started talking about this. Were we missing something about the experience of being an adult beginner?

We decided to study a language with an unfamiliar alphabet, unfamiliar sounds and plenty of words we would not immediately recognise. Russian seemed like an excellent way to make our lives difficult.

So we found a teacher and started learning.

The alphabet was not the biggest problem

Before we started, the Cyrillic alphabet looked like a substantial part of the challenge. New letters, new sounds, and the very basic business of getting through a word on a page.

It was strange at first. We had to read and write, and then read and write some more. But as we became familiar with the letters, other difficulties took up much more of our attention.

Remembering the words from one lesson to the next. Hearing differences between sounds we were not used to. Getting our mouths to produce something reasonably close to what our teacher was saying.

As teachers, we knew that these things took practice. As students, we were finding out how much patience that practice could require.

We did not all learn at the same speed

This was one of the things that surprised us most. We were a group of language teachers, but being good at teaching a language did not give us all the same experience of learning one.

Some things came easily to some of us. Others struggled. We could be sitting in the same lesson, hearing the same explanation, and having very different levels of difficulty.

We also experienced the awkwardness of trying to make a sound that felt completely unnatural. You hear the teacher say it. You have a go. What comes out sounds funny to your own ears, and you are not always sure how to fix it.

There is quite a lot happening in that moment, beyond whether you understand the explanation.

We started working on the problems between lessons

We needed ways to remember vocabulary and opportunities to build sentences with it. Living in Tel Aviv, we could not simply assume our daily lives would provide enough Russian practice.

That led us to try things: associations for difficult words, flashcards, and a board full of vocabulary that we used to challenge each other to make sentences.

Those experiments became some of the ideas we shared with our Hebrew students. The sentence-building exercise and the vocabulary method each have their own post here, so you can try them without signing up for Russian as well.

Learning together also gave us time with a teacher from outside our own school. We could see another person's choices about how to run a lesson, while experiencing those choices as students.

Tell us which part is difficult

If you are struggling in a Hebrew class, it helps to be specific with your teacher. Perhaps you understand a word on the page but cannot recognise it when someone says it. Perhaps you know the vocabulary but need more time to build a sentence. Perhaps you are still working out which letter you are looking at while everyone else has moved on.

Those difficulties need different kinds of practice. Tell us where you lose the thread, even if it feels like a very basic thing to ask about.