My research requires I learn Yiddish.  No, make that: I deliberately morphed my research topic into something that would give me the excuse to learn Yiddish and call it work.

I’m in a weird situation because I understand Yiddish rather well – having German and Russian means I can work out a good portion of it that way – but only now am I learning the alphabet.  I am neither very visually oriented nor very organised, so this is the hard part for me.  After a good while of listening to Debbie Friedman’s Alef Bet song over and over and over (here) and looking at charts until my eyes boggled, I finally got up the courage today to pick up my copy of Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish dictionary (which has been looking pretty on my coffee table) and attack the Foreword.  And it worked!  I was actually able to read Yiddish without relying on transliteration… very very slowly and painstakingly.  I don’t remember the Cyrillic alphabet being so hard, but then I learned Cyrillic nine years ago.  Suddenly I am feeling very old, but still very proud  of myself.

I’m also reading The New Joys of Yiddish, the updated version of Leo Rosten’s original.  I highly recommend it, especially to people who want to learn about the Yiddish influence on English (and it’s in transliteration so you can read it without knowing your alef bet).  It’s an education.  I knew mishegos, schmeggegge and schlemiel were Yiddish words but I had no idea about cockamamie, a-ha and maven.  Neither did I know the difference between Yinglish and Ameridish.  Oy!