got my mind on my Yiddish and my Yiddish on my mind
A short piece on diving into the shallower end of language lessons
I went to sign up for the YIVO Institute’s Yiddish language reading class for fall, and it is offered at a time that isn’t at all convenient for me. I pouted for a couple of days, then checked into their other course offerings, realized that Reading Yiddish is indeed what I want in order to be able to read the texts my grandfather Abe wrote, and also realized that I can be patient and do it in the spring. Part of the molting process that I began after having surgery last winter has been a sense of urgency about getting on with projects, the book being the biggest one of those projects. And since I’ve identified that learning Yiddish is going to help me write the book, I had researched and gotten invested in the idea (and paid the YIVO Institute $54 as an annual membership fee) of taking Yiddish in this specific way, on Zoom with a professor. But then it hit me that this is 2023! We have tiny machines in our pockets that can help us become acquainted with a new language, without a professor involved. It doesn’t negate the need for classroom learning, but I’d be a fool to show up in the spring having done absolutely nothing to try to acquaint myself with the language. I can at least shake hands with it on Duolingo.
So, this morning, shake hands I did. A funny thing that happened several weeks ago is that I had a bit of time on my hands and went to Duolingo and started the process of signing up for Yiddish and when I saw the characters and heard some of the sounds of the language, my palms got sweaty and my brain froze up and I thought, No way. Give me a textbook and a tape recorder. This can’t be done online. And I switched immediately to Portuguese, which, great, I’ll be visiting Portugal later this fall. But that’s for four days. How intensely do I really need to study it? Besides, I already have a little Portuguese from having worked with Brazilians and learned a bit from them when I worked in East Boston as an ESOL teacher approximately five million years ago. Anyway, this morning I went back to Yiddish and dove in. There’s an option to just work with learning the alphabet, which I felt was a good first step before diving into the exercises, so I repeated back the sounds of each letter and consonant and vowel combination. My brain resisted the heck out of it.
In fact, I felt utterly lost. The characters seemed crude and foreign, ie., they didn’t correspond in any way to the sounds made by English letters -- in fact, there are a few Yiddish characters that look like English letters but make totally different sounds. And there are some Yiddish letters that look different when they appear at the end of a sentence than when they are in other parts of a sentence. My brain was tripping over itself to keep up, and I started to get discouraged, because -- this is so embarrassing to admit --
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