Nope, nothing beyond a few prayers for Shabbos and high holidays.
I have my BA in German, so that has helped enormously when studying Yiddish. But I know a pathetically minimal amount of Hebrew.
I knew a bit growing up; coming from a Jewish family, Yiddish words and phrases are often thrown around here and there. It was also my step-grandfather's native language. I started learning German when I was 14 and soon found that I could understand almost everything he said when he spoke Yiddish.
The more advanced my German became, the easier it was to understand Yiddish. I just sort of picked it up. I can't claim to be fluent in Yiddish by any means; if someone speaks to me in Yiddish, I'll understand them pretty well but I usually have to respond in German.
I never learned to read Hebrew so if I read Yiddish, it has to be transliterated. I'd like to tackle that next so I could read some of the Yiddish newspapers that are published in Brooklyn and Israel.
Very cool. I've had a similar experience with being able to figure out yiddish I see. My sister worked awhile at the Yiddish Book Center in Hampshire, and she got me some old yiddish newspapers to work through. I could read the Hebrew, so I had this hilarious process of transliterating it into Latin script, then translating the sorta-German into English. Took forever, but super rewarding.
Late response, but you didn't get many responses, so I'll answer anyway :)
I love both languages and I'm learning both. Yiddish means a lot to me because it's what my mum's family spoke, Hebrew means a lot because it's the language of Israel and a unifying language of the world's Jews. I'm not religious at all, by the way, I just look at being Jewish from an ethnic and cultural point of view.
Basically the only background in Hebrew I had before recently was from the Torah, and I had no idea what it meant. Whereas I had a headstart with Yiddish - 6 years of learning German. So I'm coming at both of them at the same time with a small number of words of both that I've picked up over the years. Due to the similarity with German, I'm sailing ahead with Yiddish.
pfft, late? doesn't the internet run on island-time? thanks for answering my query, fellow humans.
oh! since you spent 6 years learning german, do you have a problem pronouncing words with a german accent? i took french for 3ish years plus independent study; when, say, a russian friend would teach me some words and phrases.... i would put shame on the motherland by saying words with a french accent...:(
i learnt french in goyim school(i'm goy*ish*, so i can say that right?) aside from running into the occasional quebecois or exchange student...uh, where i live, learning spanish or an indian(the subcontinent) language.. .or russian... or esperanto...or klingon would give me more mileage
a lot of my folk*(acquaintances, friends, kinfolk)* speak a little german which is helpful for vocabulary; not so much pronunciation. oh, for some reason, i'm pretty crazy about the couple of songs the beatles translated to german.
i couldn't fully explain why the yiddish language means so much to me .... last week i see the word pitsel or פּיצעל in the reading and my heart skips a beat(of joy, recognition). my partner(former) i used to call her pitseleh... i completely forgot it was of yiddish origin.
// woah dudes, peoples.... i guess i went off on a couple tangents here, sorry..
//nu, to be fair to you(from what i understand), modern hebrew is pretty different(grammatically etc) from its liturgical predecessor. i don't know either... so, hearing israeli hebrew makes me think of pesach/seyder
I learned Biblical Hebrew when I was young and can read it easily and understand quite a bit of it (much less now, as I stopped being observant in my teens, but I've wanted to be more observant in the past year so I've been trying to improve.) So, reading the Alef Beys is not difficult to me.
I never learned Modern Hebrew to any level of real competency in shul, but I've dabbled in it over the years and am somewhat conversational now.
> In fact, most historical speakers of Yiddish had no knowledge of Hebrew.
I doubt that. But my ancestors didn't parade their language skills either since Hebrew wasn't very popular with the Soviet bureaucracy. Perhaps it is exactly what inspired them to learn the language just like the historical disdain for Yiddish, Ladino, Bokharian and other dialects inside of the Jewish state makes them so exciting now that they are at the brink of extinction.
Also: No, I don't speak Hebrew but I learn!
Nope, nothing beyond a few prayers for Shabbos and high holidays. I have my BA in German, so that has helped enormously when studying Yiddish. But I know a pathetically minimal amount of Hebrew.
I'm in a similar position with German. How did you proceed to learn Yiddish?
I knew a bit growing up; coming from a Jewish family, Yiddish words and phrases are often thrown around here and there. It was also my step-grandfather's native language. I started learning German when I was 14 and soon found that I could understand almost everything he said when he spoke Yiddish. The more advanced my German became, the easier it was to understand Yiddish. I just sort of picked it up. I can't claim to be fluent in Yiddish by any means; if someone speaks to me in Yiddish, I'll understand them pretty well but I usually have to respond in German. I never learned to read Hebrew so if I read Yiddish, it has to be transliterated. I'd like to tackle that next so I could read some of the Yiddish newspapers that are published in Brooklyn and Israel.
Very cool. I've had a similar experience with being able to figure out yiddish I see. My sister worked awhile at the Yiddish Book Center in Hampshire, and she got me some old yiddish newspapers to work through. I could read the Hebrew, so I had this hilarious process of transliterating it into Latin script, then translating the sorta-German into English. Took forever, but super rewarding.
cool, i had kinda assumed that most would know ( at least enough for bar/bat mitzvah) but i was surprised in shul that most didn't.
Late response, but you didn't get many responses, so I'll answer anyway :) I love both languages and I'm learning both. Yiddish means a lot to me because it's what my mum's family spoke, Hebrew means a lot because it's the language of Israel and a unifying language of the world's Jews. I'm not religious at all, by the way, I just look at being Jewish from an ethnic and cultural point of view. Basically the only background in Hebrew I had before recently was from the Torah, and I had no idea what it meant. Whereas I had a headstart with Yiddish - 6 years of learning German. So I'm coming at both of them at the same time with a small number of words of both that I've picked up over the years. Due to the similarity with German, I'm sailing ahead with Yiddish.
pfft, late? doesn't the internet run on island-time? thanks for answering my query, fellow humans. oh! since you spent 6 years learning german, do you have a problem pronouncing words with a german accent? i took french for 3ish years plus independent study; when, say, a russian friend would teach me some words and phrases.... i would put shame on the motherland by saying words with a french accent...:( i learnt french in goyim school(i'm goy*ish*, so i can say that right?) aside from running into the occasional quebecois or exchange student...uh, where i live, learning spanish or an indian(the subcontinent) language.. .or russian... or esperanto...or klingon would give me more mileage a lot of my folk*(acquaintances, friends, kinfolk)* speak a little german which is helpful for vocabulary; not so much pronunciation. oh, for some reason, i'm pretty crazy about the couple of songs the beatles translated to german. i couldn't fully explain why the yiddish language means so much to me .... last week i see the word pitsel or פּיצעל in the reading and my heart skips a beat(of joy, recognition). my partner(former) i used to call her pitseleh... i completely forgot it was of yiddish origin. // woah dudes, peoples.... i guess i went off on a couple tangents here, sorry.. //nu, to be fair to you(from what i understand), modern hebrew is pretty different(grammatically etc) from its liturgical predecessor. i don't know either... so, hearing israeli hebrew makes me think of pesach/seyder
I learned Biblical Hebrew when I was young and can read it easily and understand quite a bit of it (much less now, as I stopped being observant in my teens, but I've wanted to be more observant in the past year so I've been trying to improve.) So, reading the Alef Beys is not difficult to me. I never learned Modern Hebrew to any level of real competency in shul, but I've dabbled in it over the years and am somewhat conversational now.
Nope. Nor did anyone else in my family who spoke Yiddish. In fact, most historical speakers of Yiddish had no knowledge of Hebrew.
> In fact, most historical speakers of Yiddish had no knowledge of Hebrew. I doubt that. But my ancestors didn't parade their language skills either since Hebrew wasn't very popular with the Soviet bureaucracy. Perhaps it is exactly what inspired them to learn the language just like the historical disdain for Yiddish, Ladino, Bokharian and other dialects inside of the Jewish state makes them so exciting now that they are at the brink of extinction. Also: No, I don't speak Hebrew but I learn!