Streetwise Hebrew

In this episode, I spoke with Guy Sharett who is the host of the Streetwise Hebrew podcast presented by TLV1. The Streetwise Hebrew podcast helps students learn and connect with  Hebrew spoken in the streets of Israel, offering a fresh take on what Hebrew language learning can be. The Streetwise Hebrew podcast is available on Apple, Android, and other podcasting platforms.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the forensic podcast. Foreigncy.us is a language training website for Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian, designed specifically for intermediate to advanced learners. Our daily lessons prepare you to read real foreign language news articles and listen to actual foreign language media on a wide variety of subjects to put you on the path to language mastery. If you're studying Hebrew, Arabic, or Russian, you can visit our site at foreign c dotus. That's F-O-R-E-I-G-N-C-Y.us, and enter the promo code LANguage Mastery for a 10% discount on our annual and six month subscriptions.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Guy Shaet, who is the host of the Streetwise Hebrew Podcast available on Apple and Android and presented by TLV1. Guy's episodes take a unique approach to Hebrew language learning that focus on context and giving students the tools they need to communicate with Israelis on the street. He's also working on a Hebrew slang manual that will combine many of the podcast lessons with plenty of new material. I hope you enjoy the show. I'm here today with Guy Charet, who is the host of the Streetwise Hebrew Podcast, which is presented by TLV1. And in the past, he was also led these urban language tours in Hebrew in Tel Aviv in a neighborhood that he lived in. But now he's focusing fully on Streetwise Hebrew. So thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I found out about you in your podcast by a Hebrew teacher of mine who recommended a podcast that was not necessarily designated for beginners, but people who were interested in learning real Hebrew or Hebrew that you could speak on the street that would prepare you for real life, which is how I came about finding you. And what I like about your podcast, one that's digestible. They're in eight to ten minute increments. You seem to have a knack for finding topics that are really prescient. They touch on culture, they touch on politics, but most importantly of all, they touch on language. So every topic you're presenting is integral to the Hebrew language and and and the culture, and I found that fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 2:12

Thanks for uh listening and uh thanks for your words. Basically, I think that I met throughout the years so many people that uh studied Hebrew, learned Hebrew, but when it comes to um speaking Hebrew to them, you feel they are really detached from Israelis, from the Israeli society, and from living and celebrating Hebrew if you want. And uh I kind of decided to concoct um small, you know, a short formula, like a bite of language, culture, and things I cannot you really define, which you can just inhale and uh later on use. So I try to make it uh things that we all need, we all need to say sometime. I'm fed up with this, I just love this. And um I don't think that when uh when we studied English, uh when I studied English in Ashdod Israel in the 80s, someone taught me how to say I love and how to make this voice, how to say I love. Uh, but you need to teach, you need to learn these things. Uh, and that's what I'm trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

So before you started the podcast, you were leading these language tours through Tel Aviv, which I touched on earlier. And I want to go back to that because I think a lot of the the the way you managed that and the way that you may continue to do it in the future is pretty connected to the way that you do your podcast. So, how did you get started doing the language tours in Tel Aviv?

SPEAKER_02 3:43

So the trigger was the 2011 demonstrations for social justice in Israel. And uh there were lots of uh demonstrators in the Roshell Boulevard, and they lived in tents. Outside every tent, there were uh posters, banners, and other signs that people wrote. And I I took one of my students uh to the tents enclave and I saw that sometimes she understood the words, but not the references. Someone added another word and turned something upside down. She didn't get these things. So I made a Hebrew language tour lesson where we walked, people walked with me with my whiteboard, and we read stuff and deciphered it, and kind of, you know, took this, start peeling this onion and getting uh the language, the grammar, but also if it relates to politics and there's information you need to know, and you're not from here, someone needs to be the mediator and tell you, okay, this is a show from the 80s, it's one line, but they change one letter, and then it alludes. There's another reference here to a pop song we all know. Nobody can know this unless they are taught, or or if they can get someone to show them around. And suddenly, kind of Facebook event, 20 people show up, and I start to meet what I call Ulpan survivors or Sunday school refugees, or people who try to learn Hebrew on a Sunday morning in Teaneck, New Jersey, and ended up hating it for some odd reason. And uh I saw that Hebrew can be celebrated in the street. And many times very often I meet people that had Israel of their mind when they were in the diaspora. And when they came to Israel, they found out that the language they learned is not what we speak. Maybe they spoke with Yiddish accent, which I respect, but this is not what we speak in the street in Israel. And I felt that um they need to connect in another way to Hebrew. There's another way to do it. Plus, I felt language trauma, people who were traumatized by either bad Hebrew teachers or people who were not that passionate about teaching Hebrew, and we needed some healing process of like linguistic healing, cultural rehab process, if you want to call it.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

And then came the tours. And how much of that of your experience doing the tours informed how you were gonna do the podcast going forward?

SPEAKER_02 6:19

I feel that we need context always. Learning things, list of words, list of sentences without any context, or story doesn't serve anyone. Storytelling is a powerful tool. And if I tell you a story and you connect to the story, you end up remembering the verbs I used when the story reached this and this point. Right. I'm trying to create a story when I walk in the street with my whiteboard and we see a lost pet head, and we learn how to say lost and red colour, chubby puppy, and other things. So, first of all, to in this day and age with a smartphone, people can take a photo of it. You always have some dead moments where you browse through your photos and you can look at the new words. You have a story which is already anchored in your memory somehow. And later on, when you see the words, you get back to the story. Plus, the power of the street is it's uncensored. What we see on the walls or on switch covers, this is what you've got. Right. You can uh pretend to have a picture perfect Israel, but you're in the street. You will show what you what you find. If it's swear words, then let's talk about swear words. Right. So I like the uncensored, uh irreverent kind of feel. And I also like the way I can edit things. So, for example, if I want to teach you the passive form, I can take you to places I know already signs. Um I'm taking you to this street and the second turn on the left, there is a house where it says something in the passive form. Right. Each time you'll pass there, it will be, you know, you your memory will work.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Right. I like what you said about it being unfiltered too. I I wrote a blog past on forensic a while back called R-rated Hebrew Language Learning, where pretty much just talk about how even though it's kind of embarrassing and the there's topics that clearly no university teacher, university Hebrew teacher is ever going to touch on, and definitely no Hebrew school teacher with middle schoolers or high schools will ever touch on, but to truly speak the language and to master the language, you have to learn all aspects of it, even if they're R-rated. So I I appreciate you doing that. And when I'm listening to your podcast, speaking of stories, it's clear that you're not just a native Hebrew speaker who decided you wanted to help other people learn the language. It it's clear that you've had exposure to language learning before as somebody who wasn't a native speaker of other languages. And I know that just from my own experiences learning Arabic and Hebrew, that I'd be walking somewhere and I'd wonder, how do I say that? How come I don't know how to say this? And then when I listen to your podcast, I notice a lot of the same things that you're doing. So where did you grow up and what what was your exposure to language at a young age?

SPEAKER_02 9:09

So I grew up in Ashdod, Israel. It's a port town half half an hour south of Tel Aviv, the coast of the Mediterranean. My dad was a tugboat skipper at the port. My mom was an art teacher. Our house was a living salon, which means it was open to people from really different backgrounds. Uh Ashdod was full of uh immigrants from all over the world. But my father also liked to invite home uh sailors from the port. So I would come back from the youth movement, and there would be a Filipino, Croatian, and a German sailor sitting in our living room, and I would try to talk to them somehow in English at some stage. I think that uh always um kind of stimulated thoughts about identity and who we are, where we are. Plus, we were an Ashkenazi family in Ashdod, which was uh back then a more of a Moroccan city. So either you're either Moroccan, North African, Algerian, Libyan, or you're Russian, and that's it. And a few Ashkenazi families. So I learned, I think, to switch, do some code switching between uh the Ashkenazi Hebrew at home and North African Ashodian lingo outside.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

And what about work experiences? Was there any did you work anywhere that had a similar effect?

SPEAKER_02 10:34

I think as a kid, you just switch, you don't know what you're doing even. You have a certain Hebrew for home and for Ashkenazim, and you have another Hebrew in the streets, and that's it. And only later in life, uh I met a linguist friend, Israeli as well, and she told me, wow, I keep hearing those Moroccan intonation in your Hebrew. And I was like, What? Like, what do you mean? And she showed me a few sentences and she said, Yeah, it's the Lilt, it's the it's the North African Lilt that you've got. I wasn't aware of that, although I studied linguistics, which just shows us that you always need to record informants, and you don't know anything about the way you you speak. You're not aware of these things usually. Uh but I think uh I started learning languages at the age of four or five, and um I come from a very verbal uh family and lots of uh musicians and language people, so it came from from there, I guess. And um I always uh didn't like when people censored themselves and told me, oh, I shouldn't teach you this, oh you shouldn't know this, or books that were um part of an apparatus of what you should know and the other things you shouldn't. And I always wanted uh to reveal other facets of of language when when I teach. And I want wanted to learn languages the way I teach Hebrew on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

Right. Yeah, it's always an interesting experiment when you're in the artist. Remember from being in Hebrew class in grad school in Israel and also in undergrad in the US and asking every single teacher I had, you know, how do I say to fart, or how do I say to take a shit? You know, but they'll they'll only say like, no, you say like Shiwa team. You know, you don't say that, you just say you're going to you're going to the Shiwa team. But you know, I'm be like, no, but if I'm with my friends, I'm not gonna say like I'm gonna go use the bathroom. I'm gonna say like I'm gonna go take a shit. Like, how do I say that? And you know, they just refuse, even if you're alone with them, you know, I wouldn't do it, I wouldn't ask them outright in class among other students. It's just like they wouldn't do it, you know.

SPEAKER_02 12:41

Right. So one of the most uh popular episodes uh of our podcast, Streetwise Hebrew, on TLV1, is the sex words. We did sex words one and sex words two, and we have more than 25,000 listeners and downloads for for each, I believe. And I do say in the beginning, if it's not your thing, we'll see you next episode. You're uh you don't have to listen to the show. But I think it's important to also uh understand that uh there is the conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and there is the the load of history, but people still have sex, you know, and they do it in Hebrew. And you if you move to Israel or you have an Israeli partner, you might want to know these words.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

So well, it's uh it's important also so you don't embarrass yourself, right? I mean, in the US they'll teach you if you want to say like to finish something, they'll say like ligmo instead of the sayem. And the Hebrew slang for that is to orgasm, it's not to finish an activity, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:42

So So it used it used to be uh for my generation, we used to say ligmo, and at some stage people would start to uh giggle or to say something funny. Right. And the younger generation today, ligmo is to reach orgasm, and le sayem is to finish. But back in the days it was still okay to say, yeah, you need you need to be aware of these things, and I believe that hiding them will not solve the problem. It's like suppressing parts of our being. And I like also to um to think of everyday life. I tried the podcast, I want the podcast to be something very accessible that you can use tomorrow. You're on a bus, you want to tell someone, sorry, this is too loud, you want to know how to say different things. Also on WhatsApp and other uh on social networks, which are part of our life today. We need to do it now. We cannot uh write it in a book and and publish it in five years. These are things that people need right now.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

And also on the topic of slaying, just being able to fit in with the group of friends or to speak more naturally. And those things are changing all the time. And I I think I was listening to one where you talked about it was either I was reading an article that you wrote or it was in one of your episodes, but you were talking about the AMPMs that opened in Israel and how that developed. Instead of calling it AMPM, people call it umpom. So if you're able to break that into a sentence, you know, people may respect you more in the way that you speak Hebrew or feel more comfortable with. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

So these these little things, sometimes it's like tricks or like it's a bit like cheating because maybe your Hebrew is not there yet, but you were saying something in really updated slang, and people like, oh wow, why do you know this? Right. It could be like uh a fun thing, a party piece, uh thing that you say when you meet people. I agree that it's uh sometimes it's it's a bit like it's a trick because your Hebrew might not be there yet, but you know some things. But I think it can open channels, which means sometimes you have a small window of opportunity, you meet people, you have an accent, foreign accent, and you want to say something to make them understand that you're fine. And you can say one sentence and they're like, oh wow, how did you learn this? Or why did you learn this? Or who taught you this? And it can, you know, bring the conversation to another direction.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I like it. What's your creative process for coming up with one of your episodes? And an important component of every single thing that you do, every episode that you do is mixing context with language learning or contextualized memory. So you're not just picking something out of the blue, everything you're doing has has a purpose. How do you go about now finding something to talk about? Because it's not like you're taking students on the streets anymore and you're seeing you know a sign for someone saying to clean up after your dog, and then you can start going into all that vocabulary.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

So, first of all, people write to me, uh um listeners right and say, why won't you do something about sip story, le saper to tell a story, uh te and maybe explain that sapal barber is not related uh and other things. So, first of all, I write those ideas. Sometimes they wait to simmer for a year. The podcast is already five years old. And I have to come with an episode every week, every Monday morning. I wake up and start working on an episode that will be aired on Tuesday the next day. And sometimes it's excruciating, it's sometimes really hard to find an idea and to write it. And uh it's a birth, it's a birth of an episode, and sometimes it flows just like uh writing. For example, today is Monday and I need to uh perform, and I'm not sure yet what I'm talking about. I have some ideas. Sometimes I have um ideas a few days before, sometimes it really depends. Right. Um I also I'm learning Mandarin right now, uh, working on my intermediate Chinese. And uh I don't think we mentioned before, but you're currently in Shanghai for exactly. I'm in Shanghai. I moved here for my for my husband's uh work. And um being a student again, a language uh learner again makes you humble, makes you remember what it means to be lost in translation, to be surrounded with a language that doesn't make sense to you yet. It's really good to be reminded all the time. And if you teach pure language, and uh sometimes you we all we're all human beings and we tend to be impatient, oh my god, these are you know mistakes again. But right now I sound like a first grade, second grade student uh in Mandarin, and it reminds me what it means. I'm not sure yet what I'm gonna write about today.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

Right. And does that ever inform your your podcast episodes? Like, are you studying something in Mandarin and then it pops into your head like, oh, that's a good idea to go over in the podcast?

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Or the language is so different that Exactly, because if we learn like out how to say, mmm, yum, you have yum in all languages, right? You need to know how to say it in Hebrew, or at least like a toolkit like to understand like what could I say uh for this soup? Can I say great? Uh can all the greats be used for a soup, or only some of them? Uh there are many nuances uh you can talk about. I love um emails from listeners because uh they are sometime in Riyadh, sometime in Illinois, sometime in LA, sometime in Madrid, you never know. And they have stories and they ask me questions, they tell me about their lives. And it's always interesting because Hebrew usually my listeners have stories about Hebrew about being Jewish or finding out they're Jewish or not Jewish at all, but interested. So I'm very, very much in touch with my listeners, and I I talk to them when I do the podcast, I'm thinking about them in the metro in Munich, commuting in Rio, just from the information they give me in emails.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

I want to go back to the language trauma or the ulpan refugees that you were talking about. So, what are the most common things that you find Hebrew students got frustrated with in the past, or what caused that language trauma, and how do you help them get over it?

SPEAKER_02 20:02

So, first of all, um the ulpan is good for many people, but many people cannot sit in an ulpan. Either ADHD, or uh they just learn differently, or they are too tired after a full day of work and they cannot be in an ulpan. Or they are 46 and everybody in the ulpan are new immigrants from France and they're 19, and uh it's very different difficult to be there. So we have to accept the fact that um language learning is very personal and psychology does a lot of things. So if you have uh language trauma from the past because your parents compelled you to go on a Sunday morning to Talmud Torah, and there was a rabbi there that was a bit scary and was not a passionate language teacher, but was a rabbi that someone, you know, told him, Okay, you have to teach. You end up sometime being an adult who is either afraid of Hebrew, sometimes there was guilt involved of like, um, oh yeah, my family, why didn't we move to Israel? Well, our cousins are in Israel, they went to the army, but we stayed in Milwaukee. These are all feelings that are related to our linguistic psyche. You don't learn language in a void, in a language laboratory without any emotions. We have emotions in our soul that are linked also to the language. So just like a doctor does not prescribe the same medication to everybody, we have to, I have to work with one person in one way and with another person in another way. People tell me stuff like, uh, yeah, there was this English uh person, I think he's 60 years old. He came on my tour. Uh, in the beginning of the tour, I asked, uh, do you speak Hebrew? I said, nope, I don't speak Hebrew. Okay. There were other people who did speak a bit of Hebrew or learn Hebrew. And I see that this guy reads, is reading everything that we see and very fast. Like, okay, you read Hebrew. Why read? He said, Well, I went to the Chaider when I was four or five in London, but then one day I read medaber instead of midbar. I say uh speaking instead of desert, because in Hebrew you have to guess the vowels. And the rabbi uh screamed at me, and ever since I uh I haven't opened my mouth. So this person needs uh teacher that would be also a kind of a healer and that would understand that there is there are memories, bad memories there. You can't just teach. We're not in a factory. And it was interesting to see the spark in his eyes during the tour, like he's reading Hebrew. That's great. He said he didn't, but it's a dormant part that came to life through walking in the street. I don't know if uh later on he continued with his Hebrew, but it was it was a start. And this is just one example, one story where you have to be aware of different things that happened to the person in the past.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

So for the people that subscribe to your podcast, there's an option to donate for a monthly fee, or you pay a monthly fee and you get access to some different features and some extras. And one of them is a monthly group talking session over Skype, from what I understand.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

Yeah, it's half an hour where we talk on Skype. Just now we had we had one. There were people from Austria, from Los Angeles, from London, from the East Coast in the US. We talk about different things in Hebrew, in English, and um it's like a small community of podcast listeners. And we learn some some things together.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Yeah, it's really so it's intriguing to me. I wanted to ask how you structure those. So is there is there a structure to it, or is it more free-flowing, or do you know from the get-go how are you structure those similar to the way that you structure your your podcast episodes?

SPEAKER_02 24:01

Um less structure than the podcast. The podcast is is orchestrated to the breadth. Um, the uh the chat is not. We do a small round of like, how are you? Tell me something about your life in the last few days. And that triggers things. For example, today someone, um, David from Austria said, Um, La sotvarimoter kefim. I want to do more fun things. So we spoke about kef, fun, and kefi, which is the adjective. And many people don't know it. They know kef, fun, but they don't know that things can be kefi, kefit, kefiim. So I taught that. We also spoke about Thanksgiving, Hagahodaya in Hebrew. And uh someone wanted someone thanked her stepson and told us a family story. So it's language, but it's also an encounter between people. And I don't mind if your Hebrew is not in the right level yet and you want to say something in English, it's free-flow, no, no problem.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Well, it seems like it would it would very it would very much benefit people who are able to hear you correct someone else's mistake or explain why we say things one way and not another. And I never would have thought that a group Skype Hebrew lesson like that would be, I mean, it never occurred to me. I always do one-on-ones, but hearing what you're saying makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_02 25:21

Yeah, I I won't say it's not challenging the levels because you get people from different backgrounds and different levels of Hebrew. And also you mentioned correcting people. This is really sensitive and really tricky. How to correct someone in a polite, respectful, teaching way that would not touch his or her ego. It's not so easy to be corrected and not in front of people. So uh I try to be respectful and to mention to everybody that this is uh, you know, when when I give talks around the world, especially in the in the UK or in the US, I start by saying, okay, this is a uh free space where we are allowed to make mistakes. I don't expect you to know Hebrew, I don't expect you to know any level of Hebrew. And I think people are really appreciate that because there's always a sigh of relief, like, ooh, okay, so we're fine. So it's fine to make mistakes, nobody expects anything from you. And um sometime I also decide not to correct someone. There's a flow, the person is speaking, is in front of other people. I can mention something at the end without pointing out who said something, but you have to be very tuned to the person and how they speak and what they say. They say something really sad about their dead parent, you don't stop them in mid-sentence to correct the verb. Right. Especially if everything is understood. The Hebrew uh language uh psyche will wait on the side until they they finish speaking, and maybe I will not correct them at all. And this is not so easy to see your language uh sometimes like this.

SPEAKER_01 27:08

And what are your tips for people who want to improve their Hebrew speaking skills when they're not in a session with you or they're just studying on their own and you know, talking to yourself or imagining that you're talking to somebody is just not, I never felt that it was sustainable. Do you have any other tips for improving your speaking skills when you're not speaking with people?

SPEAKER_02 27:26

So one of the things that I want to mention is that uh for those who uh become our patrons and and add a few dollars a month, and I'm not promoting now my products, I just think that it's a good product. It's a good tip. Basically, I record every episode twice. Uh once in English, and that's free for everybody, and once in Hebrew. What does it mean? It means that if you pay uh a few dollars a month, you get the Hebrew version as well, which is a mirror of the English text. Once you're intermediate or advanced, you can listen to me saying everything in Hebrew with the songs, with the pop culture notes and everything. And then you can switch to the English and then to the Hebrew again. This way, uh basically you listen to the Hebrew first, you have some blanks where you don't understand, you listen to the English, fill in the gaps, and then you listen to the Hebrew again after you learned. And this is an exercise that I love doing when I learned languages. For example, I listen to the news in Hebrew, I know that there was a plane crash in Indonesia, and then I switch to the news in Polish or in Mandarin. They speak about the Indonesian plane. I know the story, I know the context. Even if I don't understand everything, first of all, I get intonation, I get the vibe, but then I can take the text and start working on it because I know they're looking for uh the engine. I know someone found shreds of something in Java Island. This is an exercise you can do on your own with one piece of news that you can just Google today and find audio edits or just you know on YouTube. And um, this is one tip that I recommend. Another thing is context. So learning without context for me work less. So, for example, even watching two minutes of a telenovela in Spanish with Hebrew subtitles, and a guy is arguing with a girl and you understand Spanish, you listen to it, and you pause and you read the Hebrew subtitles. So, first of all, you remember things, and if you speak Spanish, your brain understood already the context and the sentence. Now you read the Hebrew, you write a few uh new words, okay, done. Two minutes, that's fine. You go back to uh your day.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

I think when you were doing um, or I read that when you were doing your your walking tours, part of it was you would go to a cooking class sometimes. And for me, watching Hebrew cooking videos is one of the best ways of combining context with language learning because they're like actively doing the activities they're talking about. It's not, I mean, if you're fighting with your girlfriend or your husband, your boyfriend, whatever, you know, you talk about a bunch of different things. You're not solely focused on the fight, but if you're cooking, you you know, he's saying, I'm cutting the celery or I'm cutting the vegetables, and you see him doing the activity, and it's much easier to connect the two things in.

SPEAKER_02 30:29

I agree. You inspire me now because I'm gonna check out some some Mandarin cooking TV show. But I I totally agree, and I think that uh these things um sometimes when we learn the language, we want it to be pure, we want them to use only Hebrew. But in Hebrew today, people use English very often to say, I don't know, to say a pie, pumpkin pie. People can say suddenly pumpkin pie instead of pie lat. But the word pie pay ale feud is a pie. Although the dictionary will have some fancy words which we don't use. Right. Um, and we have to remind ourselves that okay, use English when it's fine. Like uh, because our sometimes uh as learners we want to be earlier than thou and use like everything in Hebrew and even biblical Hebrew when we can, but we need to take it down a notch to the street level.

unknown 31:25

Right.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

I mean to speak in the street level, to speak fluently sometimes involves mixing things in that a teacher or linguist may not love, you know, saying Exactly. Zelo big deal. Sounds probably probably makes teachers cringe or you know, linguists cringe, but if you're speaking to somebody on the street, you're gonna come off much more natural than if you were to find a Hebrew equivalent.

SPEAKER_02 31:47

Yeah, I remember when I was at Hebrew U at the Department of Uh Semitic Languages, uh, as a student, I said once someone khita's manchelach, take your time. And uh one of the lecturers who was there and he was shocked and he was saddened and he was like, Really? This is what you say, you translate from English, take your time. There are so many ways to say it in Hebrew and proper Hebrew, and uh he was so angry with me, and uh I was just living uh without thinking too much, speaking my mother tongue. And you know, correcting someone's mother tongue is uh a big deal for me. Um, but it just shows you how you know people can be purists, and uh I I try to teach uh Hebrew, which is a living language, and sometimes copy things from other languages. It's not a new thing. Hebrew did it uh many things are from Aramaic. For some reason, Aramaic is considered fancy, and our judges love using Aramaic in verdicts and stuff. Uh Aramaic was the lingua franca, was the English of the old days. So now we do it with English.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Right. No news here. I want to shift to one of your next projects, which is creating a Hebrew slang dictionary. So where does that stand and what was the inspiration to get started on that?

SPEAKER_02 33:09

So I'm working on a manual for Hebrew slang. I don't call it dictionary because uh I think the structure is more of a manual. And basically the idea is to have sentences that you can use with different terms. So if you speak about combina, for example, which means um how would you translate kombina to American English? Kombina? Yeah, like I have a combina, it's basic, and I can get uh the phone line installed in one day because I have friends, I have connections, combina is sometimes connections. Connections, yeah. Uh yeah. So if I have a sentence there, it will be written in Hebrew, underneath transliteration to Latin letters, underneath word-by-word literal translation, so you know how the Hebrew structures the sentence, and then translation to idiomatic English. So I have connections there. And for each um word, like combina, there will be a few examples and a blurb, a short blurb about what it is, a bit about its history, how it probably came from Ladino. That's like one page in this manual. Um, I'd like it to be an ebook so we can update it because slang is changing all the time. Right. Five years could be a long time in a life of slang work. Right. And um yeah, I need to get uh 50% is already ready. I need to get back and and and sit down and finish this manual.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

It would be great if it was like like you say, like a like a living, a living manual, I guess. You know, because things are changing. I'm sure the day after you publish it, you're gonna be walking somewhere and realize something you forgot to include and it's gonna kill you, you know, like you're not gonna be able to sleep at night because of that. So it'd be great if you're just able to pop in and and update it accordingly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

We have the technology today, and people can also comment and uh and and you can just update things and add also uh links, uh, if there are TV shows that like celebrating some some terms or something. Another thing that I think that uh you asked for tips earlier, I think that on YouTube you find endless things about Hebrew, either songs. Uh on my podcast, I use songs and on the show notes on every episode I include the links. So you can watch if you hear a voice that you like or a genre of music that you like, you can click on links and find singers. Right. Lots of people told me, thank you for introducing me to this band or to Ali Kleinstein and other singers. And I feel this is another window, another channel that can, you know, you love a song and you start humming it when you wash dishes. Right. Humming, saying, learning the words, one thing leads to another. And yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

So when you decided to start either the dictionary, you said you're 50% done, but how do you even start something like that? Where do you start and how do you decide what goes in and and what you don't end up including?

SPEAKER_02 36:08

In a way, the podcast is already um it's a work I've done on these things. Um many of them are episodes that I should write in a different way, rewrite, edit, but I spoke about Kombina, for example. Or um if I speak about um Nim Asli, I'm fed up, or I just um uh I find this uh amazing. There are many words to uh basically express amazement in Hebrew or stuff that you love. Uh I feel that um there's so much to say, that's not the problem. The problem is uh self-discipline and and uh and working out the creativity process and to make it happen.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

Would you use the manual? I would for sure. I'm I'm always on the lookout for new tools and also coming up with you know my own methods and things that work best for me. I mean, right now I'm experimenting with just free writing, but not free writing like off the top of my head, but you know, I'll find an article that on, you know, I'll just go to YNET or you know, Mahviva, whatever, and I'll open it up and I'll click on the first thing that pops up, and then I'll pull up my notes app on my Microsoft surface, which has like a pen that I can write on. And I'll just start, I don't write word for word, but I just see things that stand out to me. And then I'll write those and I'll write the context that it's in, and then I'll move on. But I don't I don't spend my time writing things I already know or things that I know are gonna bore me. I I look for the things that I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I'm gonna write that down. And I found that kind of helps a little bit with my speaking skills because it's an active thing you're doing. It's an it's it's not a passive activity. So, you know, when you're listening, it's a whole different skill set and a whole different muscle that you're using. You're it all flows together, but I'm not finding the words and I'm not writing it down and thinking about how I'm gonna write it and form a sentence or a word. So I agree with you.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

I think you uh you said something really important that um if find things that uh are interesting. If you love aviation and you study Polish, find an aviation Polish website. And you're already half is done because you love planes. Right. If you love McCrame, just you know, and you learn French, just do things that you find interesting, otherwise it becomes a chore and it's not so fun. Right. And by the way, I love your podcast and thanks for having me here. I listened to the podcast you had with uh Dr. Jonas Siboni about Moroccan Jewish dialect and loved it. So just wanted to say that.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

Yeah, well, I I love everything you're doing too, and uh it's you know great for when I'm walking around Philly that uh to listen to those. And um so so definitely keep keep it up and uh I appreciate everything that you do. Thank you. For people who want to find your podcasts available on iTunes and on Android devices, and it's called Streetwise Hebrew, and how do they donate to you and how do they how do they become a patron that can participate in your talks?

SPEAKER_02 39:00

So if you go to TLV1.fm slash swh, you'll be schlepped into the Patreon uh website where you can become a patron, or you just Google how to become a patron, Streetwise Hebrew Podcast, and and you'll find us it's very easy. I wanted also to say that uh I try to use a lot of Arabic uh on the podcast. I know that you study Arabic. I've been studying Arabic for many years. I think it's an anomaly that most Israelis cannot speak Arabic. And um today there is a whole trend to learn Arabic. People are more excited about it, and I try to use uh wherever I can to find the opportunity to use Arabic, especially because many of the roots that we're learning uh are the same in Arabic. So I think it's a shame if you already learn uh something and Arabic can be just added, just learn it because um it's a great language.

SPEAKER_01 39:56

Yeah, it's one of the I think it's one of the most interesting topics ever because you know when somebody's speaking in Arabic, you know, I you don't put the pieces together initially. You don't, you know, if they say I opened this, if the verb is, you know, almost identical to to the Hebrew, but it doesn't sound totally identical. So if I wanted to say I opened in in Hebrew, you know, I would say patahti. But if I wanted to say it in Arabic, I'd say like fetahet, but it's the same root, fatah ha and the patacha. But you know, when you first hear it, you don't put it together and you have to go back afterwards and and look at it, and then you you know you say like, oh, that's totally the same thing. But for another conversation, I guess. So thanks again for uh for joining me. Yeah, I encourage everybody to visit your website and to subscribe to your podcast. And I look forward to the slang dictionary whenever it comes out. Inshallah. Thank you. Okay, take care of the