Starting Hebrew

We are finally getting into the routine of school and work. Before now we have only had a few Hebrew classes and there's a few things that are interesting but pretty confusing for an English speaker learning Hebrew:

1. Writing...in script the letter mem looks like a capital N but it makes an "em" sound. And you write it backwards. So instead of going from bottom left to top right, you go from top right to bottom left...try it, you have to concentrate on it.  You write everything backwards actually. To make an "O" shape goes around clockwise, instead of counter-clockwise and to make a lamed you start at the bottom of the letter and go up, not down.  It makes sense that they make the letters this way because you read and write right to left but it's very hard to force your hand to do that after making the shapes left to right for 20 years.
2. He in hebrew = she in english.
3. There are no vowels a lot of times.  We learn with the vowels so we know how to pronounce the words but on worksheets they are often left off. (In normal contexts, books, newspapers, signs, there are no vowels so we need to learn to read without them anyway.) Bt prtnd y d nt knw nglsh nd try t rd wtht vwls...hrd!
4.  All words having a gender. That effects how you conjugate verbs or adjectives...It seems like a lot of other languages do this, but in English we don't really. We can say I/they(referring to men or women or both)/you (singular or plural for men or women) go to the store.  In Hebrew you would need a different version of go for all of those different subjects, for each tense, plus the infinitive, which is a concept we don't have at all.  And in English a pencil is just a pencil, gender neutral because it is clearly not a man or women or related to either. In Hebrew, a pencil is feminine versus a notebook that's masculine. 

Anyway...it's fun to learn about all these little things but then be able to put them together to make (very simple, for now) sentences.   Learning a new language makes you appreciate how crazy your own language is and notice the quirky things about it. Its pretty amazing actually, that whatever language you speak, you barely have to think about what you want to say or how to say it...whatever it is (usually) just comes right out of your mouth.