This one is for you Meredith...

What Meredith, are you studying Hebrew? You shouldn't encourage me... Hebrew is the biggest thing in my life right now, and its hard not to talk about it.

Here's the other mistake I made in class, which I didn't realize until I thought about it later. But first, a bit of grammatical background:

In English we make a plural by adding an 's': immigrants, books
When we add an adjective it looks like this: new immigrant, big book.
If you add an adjective to the phrase the noun gets an 's', but the adjective doesn't: new immigrants, big books.
One more thing: in English the adjective comes before the noun.

In Hebrew the plural is made by adding a suffix (usually a 'ot' sound or an 'im'sound: oleh-olim, sefer-sefarim.
When you add an adjective to the singular form, it comes after the noun, and it looks like this- oleh hadash, sefer gadol.
But when you add an adjective to the plural form, the adjective gets a plural ending as well!: Olim hadashim, sefarim gadolim (if we did the same in English it would look like this: news immigrants, bigs books).

Okay, got that? :-)

So in class we were writing down lists of things about ourselves (our favorite book, our dream, our birthday, our favorite sport, our philosophy of life, etc.)Then we had to pass them in to the teacher, who read some of them out loud while we guessed who had written them.

Under 'philosophy of life' I wrote "God is good" (or at least I thought I did). Of course, there is a lot more to my philosophy of life, but one can hardly write it in a sentence, and at my level of Hebrew!

The Hebrew word for God that I used (there are many) was Elohim. NOTICE that it has that 'im' sound at the end, making it sound like a plural! (think- Three In One)

The word 'elohim' is also used to mean 'gods', the same as we use 'God' and 'gods'. So if I am going to say 'God is good' in Hebrew I say 'Elohim Tov.' That is a simple noun and adjective- and even though 'Elohim' is plural, I should use a singular adjective (Tov) because God is One!

Only... I didn't. I wrote "Elohim Tovim" So, it comes down to a simple difference of endings, but a very big difference in philosophy. Do I think that:

"God is God" (Elohim Tov)
or that
"the gods are good"? (elohim tovim)

Oh the joy of languages! and oh the pitfalls!