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[lavendersparkle]

I'm a bit worried because I've agreed to leyn the first 9 verses of the Torah reading this Shabbat and I'm still having trouble learning it despite learning it from 'Trope Trainer' or karaoke Torah as I like to call it, for the past week. I've got verses 1-5 pretty much down, verses 6-8 I can sort of do with vowels and I haven't started learning

Comments

[cellio]

It's not the easiest vocabulary, alas. Is your trouble with the words/vowels, or with the trope

[hatam_soferet]

I read one verse in the tikkun side until I can do it reliably off the Torah side, and then do the second verse likewise, then the two together, and keep adding one verse at a time, so 1, 1+2, 1+2+3, 1+2+3+4, etc. I'm reading that same section this shabbat, I shall think of you :)

[snjstar]

Good Luck

[emperor]

I'm afraid I must confess ignorance here: I know (I think!) that there are special scrolls that you read from, but I assumed that they were the same to read from as a Hebrew Torah that I might buy froma bookshop. What presents the difficulty?

[lavendersparkle]

A Hebrew Torah from a bookshop is printed and includes vowels and the little marks that indicate the tune it should be chanted to.

The Torah scroll is hand written by lovely scribes like hatam_soferet. It does not contain vowels or the little marks that tell you the tune and some of the letters are written a bit differently to how they look in print. This means that one pretty much needs to memorise the section one is reading and the tune.

[lethargic_man]

If it's any consolation, I too appear to have bitten off at the limits of what I can chew. I'm a slow learner of leyning; I prefer to learn one verse every two days, though I can manage one a day if I have to; and prefer to learn short sections only. I recently volunteered to do the מַפְטִיר for פַּרְשַׁת פָּרָה; this involved, I thought, learning a verse and a half every day, but I thought I could manage this, as I did it for my barmitzvah and several other years, and still remember it a bit.

Only I'd forgotten, it's not the first portion from חֻקַת, it's the following six verses as well. Which means a grand total of 28 verses to learn, at the rate of two a day. *gulp* And dog whelp me if I forget a day.