Studying Yiddish in Tel Aviv

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alans
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Posts: 23
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2016 4:00 pm
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N), French,Yiddish
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Studying Yiddish in Tel Aviv

Postby alans » Thu Jun 13, 2019 6:56 pm

In less than two weeks I will be returning to Tel Aviv to embark on an intensive four weeks of study of Yiddish at a university. This will be my fifth time in Israel but my first time in 22 years and of course I am very excited. The program I am entering at Tel Aviv University is one of only
three intensive programs (longer than two weeks) in the world. The grandfather of all Yiddish programs has always been in New York-but until
last year it was prohibitively expensive. The Tel Aviv program has been in existance for about eleven years now and I'm told it's probably the best in the world. There is a three week annual program in Warsaw.
I started studying Yiddish fourteen years ago. Yiddish was my mother's first language but my father only spoke German and because of politics from before the war, he wouldn't deem himself to speak Yiddish (everything with Yiddish is and has always been political). So I heard a lot
of it when I was growing up as my mother spoke with her mother in Yiddish, but she would only say a few words to me and my brothers when we were growing up.
I studied Hebrew briefly when I was at college a long time ago and I did very well (there is some similarities between hebrew and Yiddish-same
alphabet. 10% shared vocabulary)but historically and linguistically they are very different languages and for a very long time there has been
a great deal of tension between speakers of both languages. Even today some people can't fathom the teaching of Yiddish in Israel because
hebrew is the dominant language (then Arabic),but there has been a resurgance with younger people wanting to learn about their grandparents which is relatively new.
I decided I wanted to learn Yiddish fourteen years ago when I was working on my MA in theatre. I decided I wanted to do a Phd in Yiddish
music theatre so I entered the Yiddish one month seminar in Vilnius, lIthuania. At the time there were only two schools in the world-New York
and Lithuanian and New York was far more expensive, especially for a Canadian where our dollar is considerably lower than our neighbors.
My time in Lithuania was great (before the war it was called the Paris of Yiddish culture)but the teaching was very mediocre. Foolishly
(with no study inbetween) I returned five years later and the program was considerably worse. Just the laziest pedagogy, teachers who
had no idea what they were doing, terrible administration, massive waste of money. Since then the program has died-no wonder word got out that the pedagogy was terrible and no one wanted to go anymore.

So for the past fourteen years I have been studyiing less rather than more. Three years ago I was introduced to the most incredible
teacher in the world. I live in the largest city in Canada, at the start of the twentieth century Yiddish was the third most spoken language in
Montreal-my place of birth-but now it is virtually impossible to find a teacher. I am incredibly fortunate to have met the person I did
because she has motivated me beyond belief. her support, her pedagogy, she is just amazing.
I was interested in starting a Phd in Yiddish theatre this coming fall so I had to take Yiddish at the university level-and then I found
out that I couldn't do the Phd part-time so that ruined everything for me. The instructor of intermediate Yiddish at the unversity
was the worst teacher imaginable. i won't go into detail all of the horrible things she did-but it was a massive waste of time and money.
Her idea of teaching a language was forcing us to write five pages of rules every class-no conversation, no reading, it was just idiotic.

I have continued with my private tutor, my speaking ability is close to non-existant (there is almost no one to speak to apart from
my current teacher),I struggle with the grammar, but my reading has really improved. I still rely very heavily on a dictionary but perhap
I am trying to read at a level that is too high for my ability right now.

The thought of returning to an intensive program is incredibly exciting and somewhat overwhelming. I know the days are going to be long with a tremendous amount of study required, but it's all I want to do when I'm there. I don't know where I will be when I complete this program but with what it is costing me I am hoping I will be somewhat more advanced then I am right now. I've read that some people
try and devote at least ten minutes a day, even without taking a class (I've been told in class you are expected to do about three hours
of homework a night). I find this really difficult to do and I'm always aiming to get there-but I work full-time and sometimes the thought
of picking up the text book is not as appealing as just sleeping or listening to music. But this is my goal.

So I hope to write here about my journey back to school, if only for one month of intensive study. I feel like the luckiest person in the
world because I can afford the time off from my job, and I have the earnings to afford this program right now. Trying to rent an apartment in Tel aviv is insane-the costs are out of this world.

As such my journey begins. Yiddish is such an emotional and personal language for me. As a teenager and a younger man and even
today I have always loved music in hebrew, but the language always confounded me. Yiddish is a language from the heart, it's my roots, the language of my childhood and my grandmother. A fellow student of mine told me after class one day last term that when she started
studying Yiddsh a few years back, her teacher told her you can't separate the heart from the learning of the Yiddish language. The
language is about the soul, it comes from the soul. So I embark once again, with hope and tremendous excitement and I will have to
see how things go. Interestingly one week before I leave I'll be turning sixty, and a part of me thinks what's the point anymore? Why
make life more difficult with added work? But I remember what someone once told me about learning-it's the road that matters and not
the destination-and with that I will carry on for now.
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alans
White Belt
Posts: 23
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2016 4:00 pm
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N), French,Yiddish
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Re: Studying Yiddish in Tel Aviv

Postby alans » Mon Jun 17, 2019 5:36 pm

Received my schedule and orientation package for my summer program studying Yiddish in Tel aviv yesterday. To my complete surprise I have been placed in intermediate three, one below advanced. This is based on four paragraphs I submitted about my family and a listing
of the study I have done so far. I'm afraid this level is way too high for me-but I'm going to give it a try and see what happens. I may
have to move down a level-I'd rather not disrupt my study and another class-but I really don't feel confident that I'm at that level.
There are so many pieces to learning a language and the school acknowledges that people's passive knowledge may be a lot stronger
than their active knowledge. There will be conversation in my daily classes-something I am close to horrible in-and a few afternoon
extra conversation classes, but my speaking is way below my reading and understanding. My reading is my strongest point. I just
picked up Yiddish af Yiddish which is the only intermediate text book available (there is also Mordecai Schecter's but it seems to work
more as a linguistic manual with not many reading exercises). I was able to read pretty much throughout the book quickly, but I would
need a dictionary to get every word.
The standard text book for Yiddish taught to English students is College Yiddish by Uriel Weinrich. This book first written in 1957 and reprinted many times, is pretty much the bible of Yiddish text books. I would say almost anyone who has gone through a summer or
university Yiddish education program has used College Yiddish at some point. A polygot I studied with briefly told me it is the best text book in any language. I have always found it very dull and very problematic. The explanation of grammar is very old school-lots of rules,
too many on each page, and then a few exercises with a long story to begin each chapter. The stories that begin each chapter are not
really relevant anymore-there are numerous stories about Holocaust survivors or life during the second world war, a great deal on Jewish holidays-I wouldn't say it's the most current text. He also has quite a few chapters that are just jokes and his sense of humour is very odd.
But many people swear by the book. On it's own I never could have learned the grammar. His explanations are just too vague and complicated.
The book that I relied on the most was volume one of Sheva Zucker's Yiddish-an introduction. This is a very user friendly text book, for
example when introducing the cases she doesn't throw them all at you at once. Her book is full of interesting stories and many songs
which is a popular way to learn Yiddish in a classroom setting. With each chapter the stories at the beginning of each section get longer
as does the list of vocabulary. Her explanation of grammar is probably the best one can do. It's a good book and easy to use for self-study which I imagine many people to. She came out later with a second volume which is much longer. The stories introducing each chapter are several pages long (she gives you numbers for the lines so it lets you ground yourself when reading the text)and she includes
more complicated grammar. I haven't started the text yet because even though I have finished the text book (one)in my private lessons a long time ago, I still haven't completed every exercise and I hope to get that done in the next two or three weeks. Probably after my
summer intensive program I will then turn to her second volume. A quick look at the contents indicates that her stories in the second volume tend to be on the safe/dull side. There are chapters devoted to all of the major Jewish holidays and a chapter on the Holocaust.
She doesn't really seem to offer samples from any of the great writers-sticking mostly to her own writing. As I said it's a thick book with
a tremendous amount of vocabulary and I have no idea how long it will take me to get through it.
There is a brand new Intermediate Yiddish language book coming out by an English professor, but this book has been delayed for almost
two year now. It was supposed to come out finally last January and I ordered it (very expensive)but now it's been delayed until July
1st and I don't know if it will be available even then.
Texts for studying Yiddish beyond the beginner stage are almost non-existant and problematic. It seems as though most students finish one of the two major text books and then go straight into reading literature-which can be quite a jump. So apart from Zucker's second
book there isn't the opportunity to continue studying much grammar-unless one uses Schecter's book and I'm not sure it's very user
friendly. I don't know what people do in other language learning classes. There are also very limited resources that would otherwise available to other language learners. As far as I can tell there are only at most ten Yiddish films in existence-from the time during and before the second world war. Unfortunately none of the libraries where I live, including the University library which is very pathetic,
have copies of these films. There has been the extremely popular Israeli soap on Netflix-Shtisl-which has some Yiddish dialogue but for the most part it is in Hebrew. There was a highly esteemed newspaper that ran for one hundred years, starting out daily, then weekly, then bi-weekly , then monthly and now it doesn't come out in paper at all and is only available online, but for free. The interesting thing
about this venture is that one can press on a word on the screen and you get a dictionary meaning of a word you might not know. I can't
say I find the content especially interesting, it actually reads most of the time-and I don't read it all the time-quite mediocre but that is what we have. You can also get pdfs on many many books from the Yiddish book center and read them for free on your computer or
download them to print for free or you can request to have a real copy sent to you for not a great deal of money. Apart from that there
isn't a lot more to turn to. There is a literary magazine that comes out of New York two or three times a year but the cost is exorbitant.
Fortunately there are two radio podcasts and they are both very very good. My favorite comes from the Boston area-Di Voch and there
are a variety of speakers and interviews and music on this podcast. Most of the speakers speak quite clear, often because they are
American born who learned their Yiddish in university.
That's my low-down on Yiddish resources. Not a lot to work with and virtually no one to speak with. A good friend of mine is fluent
but she is 92 (may she lives until 192!).Pretty much the only people who have any knowledge except for the ultra-orthodox Jews who
speak a mishmash of Yiddish and American are people who have studied in university and only three universities in my country offer
Yiddish and two of them only offer beginners. So there isn't a whole lot to work with.
Ok off to my study now.
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Deinonysus
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Re: Studying Yiddish in Tel Aviv

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Jun 17, 2019 6:45 pm

Good luck with your class! I'm sure the people running it knew what they were doing; they wouldn't place you into the top intermediate level if they didn't think you could handle it.

I randomly found a used copy of Uriel Weinreich's College Yiddish in a bookstore in Maine a few years ago. I wondered if he was any relation to Max Weinreich of the famous quote "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" (I didn't realize that Uriel was his son). I read through the first chapter and I found that I could understand every word because of my knowledge of German (except for a Hebrew word or two; I think one of them was משפחה which I recognized). I'm glad to hear that the book is so highly regarded, even if it might be a little dull.

By now you might not have much left to get out of it, but are you familiar with Assimil's Yiddish course? Like most Assimil courses it claims to go up to a level of B2, although I've been through the English book for learning French and my French is not quite at a B2 level.
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