skygiants

"I'm Jewish, of course I speak Hebrew;" dude, you are a secular Jew! in England! there is no 'of course' there!

It did not stress me out because it happened in the middle of a very enjoyable conversation which may someday wind up on the radio, but on Saturday I found myself explaining that while it took me two weeks in college to learn how to chant Torah and I can read a three-thousand-year-old Semitic language written in cuneiform, my knowledge of the actual Hebrew language is almost entirely confined to prayers and the one modern Hebrew verb I know is לטרפד, which is quadriliteral because it's a loanword and means "to torpedo," which explains why I remember it.