So you know that whole European-immersion method for learning a language? Basically the concept is that you immerse yourself fully into the language you wish to learn and Voila! You have mastered a new language.

My daughter, Shira, has a new method that I’ve titled the reverse-European-immersion method. The concept being that you immerse an English-speaking teenager into a Hebrew environment and after a whole year the teenager is still speaking English only and the Hebrew speaking friends have miraculously learned English. That’s my Shira!

I learned of this when an Israeli friend of mine, whose daughter and Shira could totally not communicate due to the language barrier, told me that her daughter started speaking English out of the blue. “Where did this English come from?” my astonished friend asked her daughter. She answered, “From Shira Ben-David. She only speaks English, she’s my friend, so I learned English.”

I recently hired a tutor for Shira who would, for an hour a week, create a Hebrew-only environment for her in which she would speak and be spoken to in Hebrew without feeling inhibited. Except that he spoke to her in English! When questioned he gave me some crazy story about helping her ease into Hebrew and I was thinking, what is with this? I am paying him to speak to her in Hebrew, and she convinces him that he should speak to her in English. And she will be learning WHAT exactly?

Man, if you ever need someone to do the impossible, like, convince gravity to go in the other direction or something, hire Shira!

Laura Ben-David is the author of numerous articles and the book, MOVING UP: An Aliyah Journal, a memoir of her move to Israel. For more from Laura Ben-David see her blog at http://www.blog.aliyahbook.com.