Tackling Hebrew

After watching a TED talk from the founder of Duolingo, I thought this might be the time to learn some modern Hebrew.  I've become proficient, though hardly mastered, liturgical and Biblical Hebrew.  Repetition at services with commentary from the Rabbi and glancing at translation when I did not really want to follow the Hebrew text added vocabulary.  When I do a Torah or Haftarah reading, I always review the translation, if only to have the chanting of the Hebrew text make sense to those in attendance who have auditory comprehension of the language.  But conversational Hebrew, not even close.  I've been to Israel and had to gesture when asking directions.  I've downloaded Israeli FM Radio on my smartphone but haven't a clue over what is being said.  And now that Israel is at war, messages in Hebrew that I cannot read appear in my from Twitter and FB a few times a day.

Duolingo seems to be a hybrid of educational enterprise and hi tech company.  They have an underlying purpose, enabling people in economically disadvantaged regions to enhance their employability by learning English mostly, or in other places Spanish or French as a parallel language to the dominant one.  Having now been a tourist in a few places where English is not the lingua franca and on cruise ships, employment in the enterprises servicing the tourists is difficult if there is no ability to communicate with English speakers.  But Duolingo offers other languages including Hebrew.  They also have incentive systems borrowed from other social media companies to keep people attracted to their screens.  They advertise consecutive day streaks in particular, along with countdown clocks.

Getting started had its bumps.  Sign on easy.  Since many language learners really don't start as true newbies, they try to assess baseline skill.  For Hebrew I had pretty much all the introductory vocabulary understood.  Grammar and sentence structure was not seriously lacking.  So I did OK, not a new learner.  The exercises are a mixture of reading and translating from one language to another.  And they include writing.  Now big snafu.

They read a sentence and asked me to type it.  My keyboard is not set for Hebrew.  I just tried to move on.  After two sessions their algorithm declared me unprepared.  It terminated my session.  It cancelled my consecutive days of learning streak.  No incentive to come back. 😠

I sent Duolingo customer service a note.  No response.  A not entirely friendly email the next day, not assisting me but taking a poke at how my consecutive day streak had been lost.😠

There is a rational me that controls the emotional me.  The best adaptation would be to just enable my keyboard to type Hebrew.  It's not straightforward, but probably within my capacity.