Americans Look, I'm trying to learn Hebrew. I'm doing the best I can, but there's a limit to how much my eyes can twist around, go back and forth, and up and down.
It was hard enough for me to check out my Siddur from right to left instead of the way G-d wanted letters to be printed on a page. But you guys make me go up and down also. If I want to know the vowel then my eyeball has to go up and down at the same time that it goes right to left. Well hello-o-o-o, it's not built to do that.
Now that I'm also trying to learn how to read from the Torah, my eye has to hit the bottom and the top of the letter at the same time as it's going from right to left. No wonder so many of you Israelis are cross-eyed.
Now if you guys want me to learn how to read Hebrew and then I'm supposed to read from that there Torah, then you gotta put everything on one straight, left-to-right line, the way that everyone in the world is taught to read in school. You do have schools in Israel, don't you?
How do you pronounce those Hebrew words, anyhow? Take that word Knesset. Shouldn't it be pronounced Nesset, just like you drop the K in "knife?" If it has a silent K, then why do some of you guys pronounce that K?
Same thing with Psagot. That P should be silent, like in "psychology." Even the Greeks probably know that you don't pronounce that P. Why do some of you pronounce it? Don't you know the rules of the language?
I guess not, because I heard you pronounce the name of President Lincoln Street as "Lincollen," and LaGuardia Street as "LaGardia."
******
Oh, isn't that cute! Look at those little children. They're talking Hebrew. They know Hebrew already and they're so young. Listen to them. They sound just like real Israelis. Isn't that cute?
Well, what did you expect? They are Israelis.
And did you expect maybe to hear Yiddish from them? Well, actually, some of the children do speak Yiddish. Perfect Yiddish. Better than your grandparents spoke.
I know, I know. You expected to hear them speaking English. After all, that's what little children are supposed to speak. Big children go to Hebrew school or maybe even Yeshiva and then they learn how to speak some pathetic, corrupt, halting Hebrew, perhaps enough to be able to get an aliyah at the Torah, but certainly not enough to make aliyah to the Promised Land.
Well, if you would stop talking so loud on the bus and just listen to what people are speaking all around you then maybe you would notice that people are speaking Hebrew, and if you would walk into a store and listen to what people are talking instead of insisting on speaking English then maybe you would realize that Hebrew is the language that these children hear all around them all the time.
Yes, I suppose that you could say that when they speak Hebrew it's cute. Just about anything that a little child does is cute. It's just as cute as when a little child in an English speaking country speaks English. Sometimes haltingly, sometimes with mistakes. But little children are always cute.
But it's not more cute than that.
Now, you might think that it's cute that the Israeli children who speak Hebrew all the time can also sometimes communicate in English.
Well, that's not cute either.
It's just that you're not used to having the experience of listening to a child speak in another language. In most English speaking countries children don't know anything but English. Well, that's the opposite of cute. Perhaps you can call it uncute or something, but the natural situation is in most of the world for children to know their own native language and another language such as French or more likely English.
We do have to thank the Americans for that. Americans go all around the world, visit all over, and they just expect the natives in any other country to speak English so there's no reason for Americans to know any other language.
In many cases the Americans are right in their expectations and as a result people all around the rest of the world have to learn a second language.
That's just fine with us. It raises our intelligence. It raises our understanding of languages and it makes us better people to be able to know a second language. We thank you for giving us the need to have that second language. And yes, we take both languages very seriously and yes, we can communicate most of us in Hebrew and we can do a very good job of it. Thank you very much for your support.
Now, don't you wish that you knew Hebrew as well as these little children? You would love to be cute also, wouldn't you?
who travel abroad
for the first time
are often shocked
to discover
that,
despite all the progress
that has been made
in the last 30 years,
many foreign people
still speak
in foreign languages.
- Dave Barry
Pronunciation
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