Having worked in an early phase start-up before, I was accustomed to a lot of the type of work needed to get done to be successful. I have worked on multiple dynamics in the past - crowd-funding, social media networking, grant outreach, market analysis, business development, and more - but I have never done any of them in a foreign language. While we speak and work in English at the office, outside everything is Hebrew, and sometimes even Arabic. At this point, I have been learning Hebrew for long enough where I am able to understand about 80% of what I hear, but this is mostly in a classroom environment. When we go to large lectures and competitions where leaders in the hi-tech field are talking about their new innovative backdoor coding software I struggle to keep up, to say the least. It is even harder when I have a joint phone call with my co-worker Rabea, and a potential Arabic speaking partner, because within the first five minutes they automatically switch to their native tongue.
The language barrier has definitely been my biggest obstacle yet, but I have definitely come a long way in my short time here. I am never hesitant to ask someone to clarify a word, and try to speak in Hebrew as much as possible to sharpen my skills. I won't even begin to touch Arabic now, but I'll be taking it in the fall.
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