lessons 17 and 18 

hee ovedet be'universitah





?מה את כותבת    
mah at kotevet? 
 

don't forget the exercises at:

 

http://www.memrise.com/course/78569/modern-hebrew-for-beginners-2/

אני כותב                         anee kotev                              I write (masc.)

היא כותבת                      anee kotevet                           I write (fem.)

מכתב                             michtav                                   letter

אני כותב מכתב                anee kotev michtav                I write a letter

?מה אתה כותב                  mah ata kotev?                       what do you write? (masc.)

?מה את כותבת                  mah at kotevet?                      what do you write? (fem.)

ספר                                sefer                                        book

אני כותבת ספר                 anee kotevet sefer                  I write a book (fem.)

איפה אתה                        aifo ata                                   where are you?

אוניברסיטה                      universitah                              university

אני באוניברסיטה               anee be universitah                 I am at the university

היא עובדת                        hee 'ovedet                               she works

הוא עובד                           hu 'oved                                   he works

איפה היא עובדת                aifo hee 'ovedet?                      where does she work?

איפה הוא עובד                   aifo hu 'oved?                          where does he work?

הוא עועובד  בקולנוע               hu 'oved be kolno'a he             works at the cinema

היא עובדת באוניברסיטה     hee 'ovedet be universitah        she works at the university


prepositions
be is very useful it means in and at and it is joined to the following noun like the article. This is a bit irritating at first because it blurs the beginning of the noun when learning to read. Other prepositions and the conjunction and do the same. So when reading a Hebrew text it's always important to remember that nouns often only start with the second letter.

verbs
just two verbs today and they are pretty easy too, meaning they are quite regular in the present tense.
kotev - kotevet  and oved - ovedet  both taking the -et ending for the feminine forms.

three root consonants
now, there is a thing you might have heard about, that's pretty special for the verbs in semitic languages. They can be analysed and described with regard to the consonants they contain.
the average verb can be reduced to its three root consonants which always stay the same while vowels and prefixes change according to tenses. This concept is really important to understand conjugation and I will come back to it regularly, but for the moment I just wanted to introduce it for the first time:

so, if you look at kotev or lomed it is easy to find the three consonants:

kotev :                k t v              כ ת ב

lomed :               l m d            ל מ ד     
 
for oved  it's:      ' v d             ע ב ד

 with practice it gets easier.

All this is really important if you want to find a verb in a dictionary because they are classified according to the 3rd person singular past tense. This tense is the easiest and most regular and generally only involves the three root consonants plus the vowel a :
the past tense for    he wrote :        katav
                               he learned:      lamad
                               he worked :     'avad
of course not all verbs have three consonants and there are some quirks but it's not too bad and it'll be explained later in little increments.
The past tense in this course is not coming until lesson 41/42 so there's plenty of time to get used to all these ideas.