Like you, I am a bit surprised that no other Polish textbook for Yiddish exists. The Soviet period was of course not very conductive to this sort of things but I would have expected for at least a few textbooks to have been published since the 90s.
I'm vaguely intrested in this language so I listened to some episodes from yiddish24.com mentioned in guyome's log and I thought my knowledge of German would allow me to understand something but in all honesty, I could only make out some German sounding words here and there and that's it.
I guess you'd get a lot more after getting even a little bit acquainted with the regular sound changes between Yiddish and Modern Standard German. Knowing a few common words and grammatical differences would also carry you a long way.
Nevertheless, I think it is true that Hasidic Yiddish (which is what you hear on Yiddish24) is on average slightly more challenging than Yiddish coming from other sources. I can think of a couple of reasons (just my gut feeling here, others may disagree):
- all male speakers are familiar with
loshn-koydesh (Hebrew/Aramaic), which means you can get a lot more of it in their speech
- Hasidic Yiddish is a living tongue, spoken by all kinds of native speakers in all kinds of contexts, while Yiddish in secular contexts now often tends to assume the status of a Holy Tongue, i.e. something to be revered, preserved, and spoken with a due sense of respect. When you add to the mix that nowadays secular speakers can be non-native speakers and that secular Yiddish is often limited to "ceremonial" contexts (talks, conferences,...), you get a Yiddish that may be spoken more slowly and clearly, adhering more closely to standard spelling and grammar.
All this is, of course, just in broad strokes. It does justice neither to Hasidic nor to Yiddish spoken in secular contexts.
If you want to listen to more of Yiddish24, podcasts by Pinchas Glauber (such as
גוט-געפרעגט and
על רגל אחת) are maybe somewhat easier to follow than others.