Desperate for tips

amother

Honeydew

Thu, Nov 09 2017, 7:09 am

Ds just started learning gemara this year. He's really struggling with memorizing the words. We have flash cards, and poor kid. He spends so much time reviewing them, drilling, yet never remembers more than half the next day. It's torture for him, and not even working.

The usual tricks, try to think of a mnemonic, or word that sounds similar, are very hard with these types of words. Trying to incorporate the words into speech as a way to reinforce them, also doesn't really work. Drawing pictures of the words doesn't really work for many of them and is also way too time consuming for the amount he needs to learn every week.

Just as an example, here are 3 words from his flashcards: Hachi = like this. Hacha = here, hasam = there.

The rebbe wants the boys to be able to spit back the words out of context and out of order.

All suggestions greatly appreciated!

Kiwi13

Thu, Nov 09 2017, 7:25 am

I had a Gemara teacher in 7th grade (coed school) who started each new segment with “Aramaic Football.” We had to learn the new words we would encounter in that section, then he took out a football and said either a word or a definition, threw the ball to someone and they had to catch the ball and say the matching definition/word. It was a very lighthearted, fun class.

We also made up sentences with the Aramaic words and had random “conversations” to reinforce the vocabulary we learned. Usually ended up being very silly.

Occasionally the teacher would throw out a challenge to the class. He would make up a long sentence of words we’d learned over the past several weeks/months and challenge he class to translate it to English or Hebrew.

At the beginning of the year he had each of us make an “Aramaic/English/Hebrew dictionary” to reference as we learned, in case we forgot something. Eventually when we looked up the same word several times, it became easier to remember in the future.

He kept it fun and exciting, and even as an adult I look back on it with fond memories and still remember many words and a lot of what I learned from Mesechet Sukkah to this day!

amother

Honeydew

Thu, Nov 09 2017, 8:00 am

Kiwi13 wrote:

Nice!!

Trying to think how to translate these into home activities...

LisaS

Thu, Nov 09 2017, 10:58 am

If your son understands the words in context as he is reading them that is the most important thing. Gemara learning shouldn't be torture. If the Rebbe is pressuring them to memorize the words I would speak to him and see if he can accommodate your son and appreciate how hard he has been trying.

Sounds like you all are already doing a great job on trying to learn these words. Eventually with use they will get easier to remember.

amother

Honeydew

Thu, Nov 09 2017, 12:09 pm

LisaS wrote:

Thank you so much for the encouragement. The rebbe is actually accommodating, I'm just afraid that my son will fall behind, and in gemara, it's hard to catch up. But maybe you're right and we should just focus on context.

amother

Black

Sun, Nov 12 2017, 11:36 am

Does he know some "rules" of Aramaic? Example: shin in Hebrew sometimes becomes taf (saf) in Aramaic. For instance, 3 = Shalosh in Hebrew (shin-lamed-shin) = Tlas (taf-lamed-taf) in Aramaic.
Also rules of Aramaic grammar.
This won't help with all the words but can help with some.

Hachi, haichi, and hacha (הכי היכי הכא) are 3 words that sound similar but have different meanings. (You wrote that 2 of those are on his flashcards.) Help him come up with a mnemonic/phrase/song to remember those 3.