Now when my parents talk in Hebrew in front of me thinking that I don’t understand, I totally get what they’re saying!
Hi, there!
I’m happy to say that my Hebrew has really improved in the past few months. When I first got here, I was basically confused all of the time. I couldn’t figure out what anyone was saying to me in Hebrew.
Sometimes I’d guess and it was a little funny, like when I tried to order ice cream by myself for the first time. I figured, how hard could it be? To make it easier on myself, I even ordered a flavor that I knew that I could for sure say in Hebrew. So I walked into the ice cream shop all by myself and confidently said to the guy behind the counter, “Ani rotzeh shokolad.” Which means: I want chocolate. How could this go wrong, right? Well, the next thing I knew, the guy was talking to me about sports, or so I thought.
He asked me, “Rak kadoor echad?”
I thought, Why is this guy asking me about a ball? Why did he just ask me if I only want one ball? I must have looked super confused, because the next thing I knew, he stopped talking, handed me my ice cream scoop, and told me how much to pay.
When I got home, I called my friend, Avi, and told him the story. After Avi managed to stop laughing, he was nice enough to let me in on a little secret: In Hebrew, kadoor means ball but it also means scoop. So the guy was really asking me if I only wanted one scoop of chocolate ice cream! Who knew? Not me, that’s for sure.
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