Wetherhorn

When I started this blog one of my earliest posts was about joining the Navy. I mentioned that I had wanted to visit Israel, but my local draft board made it difficult. The redult was that I planned to go to Israel when I finished my initial required active service. The plan was a bit vague at first. But the more I thought about it, the more it began to tae shape. As a released serviceman I would qualify for educational aid under the latest version of the GI Bill.  I checked options for going to Hebrew University in Jerusalem on a program for an MA in Near Eastern studies. I wanted to learn about the country, so I avoided the various American Exchange x=student programs.  Instead, I would apply as a regular student and avoid the special classes taught in English for those programs. The quwstion that remained was could I handle courses on that level with my limited (at that time) Hebrew vocabulary. So I embarked on a self study program while on active duty,

My ship was due for an 8 month deployment cruise to the Far East. So I subscribed to a basic Hebrew language weekly newspaper designed to help new immigrants to Israel. I also made friends with a young Israeli couple living in Long Beach and was able to borrow several paperback novels from them. I already had a Hebrew-English dictionary. When the ship sailed I began receiving the newspaper. It was only a few pages, and had stories that were aimed at helping to learn the language. The first copy took me all week to get through. But by the end of our cruise I was reading the entire paper on the same day I received it. The paperbacks wee also very useful. Most of them were Perry Mason Mysteries by Erle Stanly Gardner that had been translated into Hebrew. By the time I returned to the US I was reading them reasonably well. My application to the  university was accepted, and when I arrived I had little difficulty in keeping up with the lectures in Hebrew. I also consciously made friends with Israeli students and tried to avoid the trap of running in social circles with English speaking exchange students. What I had not considered was the language requirements imposed by the university.

To get an MA in Near East Studies at Hebrew University you had a number of language requirements. Of course, they wanted you to know Hebrew and English. I had no problems there. But they also wanted knowledge of Arabic ( of which I knew almost nothing). And in addition you needed either French or German. My German was not bad, but not as good as needed. And then there was the extra requirement to know either Persian (Farsi) or Turkish. All of the language requirements were needed just for an MA. For an even more advanced degree the either/or options became knowledge of both languages, In other words, I would need to handle 7 different languages. That turned out to be beyond my capabilities. Today I am solidly bi-lingual in Hebrew and English, and can still speak and read simple German, I also have a handful of phrases and words in other languages. I don’t really speak any of them, but I can pick up bits of information from certain books in French, Italian, Spanish and even Russian, and I can read road signs in Arabic. Not enough to get past the university requirements. I still think my original plan was good, but it just wasn’t broad enough to cover all that was needed.