Learn how to use the dual plural form of nouns
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| INTRODUCTION |
| Sherah:Hello and welcome back to Hebrewpod101.com. This is Lower Intermediate, Season 1, Lesson 13 - What’s Wrong with That Israeli Player? I’m your host, Sherah! |
| Amir:And I’m Amir. |
| Sherah:In this lesson, you'll learn about the dual plural form for nouns. |
| Amir:The conversation takes place at the Levi family house in the evening. |
| Sherah:It’s between Gadi and his daughter Li’el. |
| Amir:The speakers are family, and they’ll be using informal Hebrew. |
| POST CONVERSATION BANTER |
| Sherah:Israeli soccer fans are known to be very dedicated to their teams. |
| Amir:But there's one team that has taken this to an extreme and allowed racism and politics to enter the stands. |
| Sherah:They've been known to use anti-Arab chants. |
| Amir:This is unfortunate. They also walked out of the stadium once when one of their muslim players scored a goal. |
| Sherah:These incidents are far from the norm in Israeli soccer though. |
| Amir:Most teams are very supportive of their players no matter if they're Jewish or not. |
| Sherah:Many teams have players from other countries. |
| Amir:And players from different religions as well. |
| Sherah:And most fans support their players for being soccer players and don’t let racism or political opinions influence how they feel about their team. |
| Amir:Fortunately, this is true. |
| KEY VOCAB AND PHRASES |
| Sherah:Let’s take a closer look at the usage of some of the words and phrases from this lesson. The first word we want to talk about it נגד |
| Amir:This can mean “against”, “opposite” or “versus”. |
| Sherah:It carries the meaning of "opposition," so it can’t be used exactly like in English. |
| Amir:Right, you can’t use it for a phrase like “lean against the wall”. |
| Sherah:You can use it in sports when you want talk about who is playing whom. Like "Germany versus Holland" would be גרמניה נגד הולנד. |
| Amir:Or in wars like ארצות הברית נגד הטאליבן meaning "The United States against the Taliban". |
| Sherah:The next word we want to talk about is להזיז meaning “to move”. |
| Amir:It’s part of the hif'il verb group, and so it carries the meaning of causing something to move. |
| Sherah:There are two expressions we use that have this verb in them. |
| Amir:Right, the first one is להזיז הרים or "to move mountains." |
| Sherah:It means to do the impossible. |
| Amir:The second expression is לא מזיז לו or “it doesn’t impress him” |
| Sherah:Of course the לו can be changed to לי for “me” or לנו for “us” |
| Amir:For example, you could say האוכל לא מזיז לי “the food doesn’t impress me”. |
| Sherah:The last expression we want to talk about is בדקה התשעים. |
| Amir:This means “at the last minute”. |
| Sherah:The literal translation is “at the ninetieth minute”. |
| Amir:You could say, הוא הגיע בדקה התשעים. |
| Sherah:“He arrived at the last minute”. Okay, now onto the grammar. |
| GRAMMAR POINT |
| Sherah:In this lesson you’ll learn about nouns that take a dual plural ending. |
| Amir:We have a special plural ending for nouns that often come in pairs. |
| Sherah:This ending is יים, and it’s like the masculine ending ים- with an added yod.: |
| Amir:This ending is added to both masculine and feminine nouns. |
| Sherah:Right, so that means that you need to know the gender of the word, because you probably won’t be able to tell from the word when it has the dual plural ending. |
| Amir:Our sample sentence from the dialogue is תסתכלי על הרגליים של השחקן הזה |
| Sherah:In this sentence, Gadi used the word רגליים, which is "legs" and sometimes even "feet" in Hebrew. |
| Amir:This is one word with a dual plural ending that you'll use a lot.: |
| Sherah:Right, in fact, many body parts that are typically referred to in pairs have a dual plural ending and no normal plural ending. |
| Amir:There are a few different groups of nouns that use dual plural endings, so let’s go through those. |
| Sherah:Sure, the first group is expressions of time. |
| Amir:Expressions of time have a singular form, a plural form, and then a dual plural form, so they have three different forms.: |
| Sherah:Right, one example of this is “day”. The three forms are יום for “one day”, ימים for “days” and יומיים for "two days." |
| Amir:Another example with an expression of time is for “month”, which is חודש, "months" is חודשים and "two months" is חודשיים. |
| Sherah:While we're talking about expressions of time, we should mention that when you have a feminine noun that ends in heh, you use the construct noun form for it. |
| Amir:That means that you drop the ה- and replace it with a ת- before adding the dual plural ending. |
| Sherah:And example of this is שעה or “hour”, the plural is שעות or "hours". |
| Amir:For שעה to take the dual plural ending, you drop the ה- and replace it with ת-, and it becomes שעת. And then you add the dual plural ending שעתיים, which means “two hours”. |
| Sherah:I have to say that this grammar subject is one of my favorites in Hebrew. I really love the fact that you can talk about a pair of something just by adding a certain ending. |
| Amir:It doesn’t work for every noun, but we do use it often for certain things, like our second group of words, which is body parts. |
| Sherah:As we said earlier, body parts that are usually referred to in pairs usually take a dual plural ending. |
| Amir:There are a few exceptions to this, like the plural form of “lungs” which is ריאות. |
| Sherah:Most of the other pairs of body parts do use the dual plural ending. |
| Amir:Right, and with these they only use the dual plural ending, they don’t have a normal plural ending. |
| Sherah:Most of these words appear to be masculine in their singular form, but they're actually feminine. Exceptions to this are מותן or "hip" and שד which is "breast." |
| Amir:The rest are feminine, so remember this when you want to use an adjective with them. |
| Sherah:So, let’s give some examples of body parts with adjectives, so you can hear what they sound like. Amir will give the Hebrew and I will give the translation.: |
| Amir:First is רגליים קרות |
| Sherah:"Cold feet" |
| Amir:עיניים יפות |
| Sherah:"Beautiful eyes." The last group of words we want to talk about are an assorted group, some of them make sense and others don’t. |
| Amir:Right, one that makes sense was used in the dialogue and that's משקפיים or "glasses." You're basically saying “two lenses” in Hebrew. |
| Sherah:One that doesn’t make sense is שמיים, which is the Hebrew word for “sky”. This word is always used with the dual plural form. |
| Amir:מים is another word like this and you always use it in the plural as well. |
| Sherah:So, now for a few examples, one for each of these three groups. Amir will give the Hebrew, and I'll give the translation. |
| Amir:First is הם התחתנו לפני שנתיים |
| Sherah:"They married two years ago." |
| Amir:יש לו שיניים יפות |
| Sherah:"He has beautiful teeth." |
| Amir:השמיים כחולים היום |
| Sherah:"The sky is blue today." In Hebrew, this is plural “the skies are blue today”. |
Outro |
|---|
| Sherah:Ok, that’s all for this lesson. Come see us at HebrewPod101.com and leave us a comment about what you’ve learned here. |
| Amir:Thanks for being with us, everyone, להתראות |
| Sherah:Bye! |
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