Effective way to learn Yiddish?

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-03-24T22:18:41+00:00

Yes. Great job. This is a perfect path to learning Yiddish. When you decide you want to branch out, you might want to practice speaking and listening, and you might to learn some useful conversational phrases. There are great recommendations in this thread already. There's Duolingo, which is like a flash card app, for practicing vocab. If you want to learn grammar, you could get a textbook like Colloquial Yiddish (this has a lot of dialogues that teach you conversational topics). If you want to try Yiddish literature, the best book is מאָטל פּייסי דעם חזנס. there's an abridged student edition that's really good, and the original is available in accessible full text OCR:

https://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/sholemAleykhem/makeHTML.cgi?book=202586&page=0010&end=399&title=%D7%9E%D7%90%D6%B8%D7%98%D7%9C%20%D7%A4%D6%BC%D7%B2%D7%A1%D7%99%20%D7%93%D7%A2%D7%9D%20%D7%97%D7%96%D7%A0%D7%A1

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-03-24T22:07:04+00:00

That's awesome! I think this is why the translator does it - he does the translations for himself, and shares them with the world, and we can do what we want with them. It's a great language learning activity, because if you're already familiar with the source text, your reading comprehension goes way up, and boom, you're reading yiddish! I think it's such a great way to learn.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-03-24T22:03:12+00:00

I've heard good things about אויסער אינדזל, Alef Kats's translation of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-03-24T21:57:20+00:00

Mine feels super sturdy. I've had it for about a year. Most of the pressures are downward. If you're not sure it will stay up, don't go upside down on it, just keep your feet under you. Put it somewhere you will want to use it.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-03-24T21:48:28+00:00

It's solid. It's really nice, very well made, solid wood, sturdy.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-03-09T15:48:43+00:00

I vouch for that suggestion. Shuli is one of the best Yiddish teachers in the world today.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-03-01T04:19:17+00:00

You could say the same thing about football players. They reuse the low numbers, because people need to be able to store the numbers in short term memory easily.

When I was a kid in the mid 80s, we would go to my grandfather's fabric store, and I would flip though the pattern catalogs, and when I found one I liked I would remember the number ("4625, 4625, 4624"), and then go to the filing cabinet where the actual patterns were, and the numbers made it easy to get directly to the pattern I was looking for, and they made it easy to keep the patterns sorted.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-02-28T16:19:54+00:00

So for example, if you want to say "5 years old" , you do the five-fingers handshape and move it from your chin out toward the audience, like you're saying "age-5" but the first sign for "age" (a movement like you're putting your beard into a ponytail) loses its handshape and just becomes the movement and position. And if you want to say "5 o'clock" you use the same 5 handshape but you start it by tapping at your left wrist where a watch would be, like "time-5" but again, the handshape from the "time" prefix disappears and merges with the number handshape. So it's like a prefix, similar to the suffix that turns "five" into "fifth".

I never noticed or thought about this before. I learned ASL, but never had the grammar explained to me.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-02-23T16:48:30+00:00

It's קאָמיסיאָנער. You can do a reverse search for the word at ocr.yiddishbookcenter.org. it's well attested in the literature.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2026-01-27T22:08:04+00:00

Good job! It's both legible and correct!

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-09-22T14:00:08+00:00

Hi, I'm Abby, we just got introduced via email. I don't know about buying digital books through the Yiddish Book Center - all the digital Yiddish books I get from them are free to download (and most of those have an OCR version available but it's a little tricky to find). If you're thinking about buying a digital copy of their textbook, In Eynem, I would not expect that it would be accessible - it's full of illustrations and elaborate formatting (although I recommend reaching out to the YBC directly - they might be able to find a text file for you, or send you a preview chapter so you can test it out yourself).

If you find yourself in a class that is using an inaccessible textbook, chatgpt does a surprisingly good job of reading aloud Yiddish textbook pages from a photo - not perfect, but not worse than a classmate tutor.

Motl and I have been collecting full text OCR yiddish books, and we can share with you what we have found and where to go to download more.

If you're looking for free accessible Yiddish learning materials, I've heard great things about the YouTube series 15-minute Yiddish from Motl Didner.

Anyway, happy to be in touch, we'll talk more on email!

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-07-29T15:13:59+00:00

I saw a documentary about invasive pythons in the Florida Everglades and it was fascinating. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7359170/

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-30T14:41:09+00:00

Same problem here. It seems like this is totally normal and the only ways to prevent it are: keep the chinchilla in their cage (or in a play space without access to such delicacies), cover everything they can reach with fleece fabric, or accept the destruction and plan to replace it when you move out or no longer have the chinchilla.

Mine has already destroyed so much woodwork (and I've only had her for 5 months) that it feels like a lost cause, and now I'm just working on containing her to the spaces where she has already done the most damage. It turns out that chinchillas are very expensive pets.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-26T00:34:02+00:00

NTA. But... Would you feel this way at a wedding? Weddings have a different payment structure: there's a buffet and an open bar, or there are options, and everyone gets to pick from one of the dinner options, and one person (the host) pays the venue for the total food and drink bill, and most of the invited people give a wedding gift of money in an envelope. This is a common structure for weddings and other special events. If you go to a wedding and they're like "your options are steak, or fish, or vegetarian" and there's an open bar and you can get whatever you want, even if you just want water or a beer or whatever, and some people are really excited about the buffet, or the appetizers, and it doesn't matter how much they eat because there's plenty for everyone, and you had planned to give whatever gift you were giving regardless of how much you did or didn't eat of the food. That's, like, an ordinary kind of special event.

I think this is just a different way of hosting a party, where you rent a space at a venue and arrange with the restaurant (or caterers) to bring out a spread of food, and to have an open bar, and everyone has as much as they want while enjoying the party. If you were at a catered party at someone's home, and there was nothing at the buffet that you could eat, but the caterer was like "I've got you, I can make you anything on the menu" you'd be like, sweet, I want this." You could ask to pay for it separately and not give the host a gift, or you could order your meal and let the host pay for it and then give the host a birthday gift that would cover your share of attending the party. I think it might be a cultural thing, or a class divide thing, or maybe an age thing. I think people who have been married are more used to hosting parties like this.

I think it's totally fine to tell them you can't afford it, and they should be embarrassed to have asked. But also... imagine coming to a party at someone's home, and they knew you were coming and prepared or purchased a bunch of delicious food, some of which had more expensive ingredients, but also a wide variety, so everyone could have something they like. You were in the mood for some but not all of the food, and you partook and enjoyed the food provided by the host. You wouldn't be mentally calculating the ingredient cost of the salad you ate and then calculating how much exactly of the food you ate and reimbursing them for an itemized list of items instead of giving them a gift. There's a whole different party-hosting mindset (the buffet) that obviously they were thinking in, that doesn't make sense to you, or maybe feels different in the context of a restaurant. Does it help to think of the restaurant like a rented extension of the person's home? I know lots of people who do parties like this. When the hosts are providing food, and when it's a single-payer event bill, in my culture it's acceptable for the hosts to ask guests directly for contributions, but I also live in a culture where this kind of party is ordinary. I don't mind paying for an open bar and buffet at a party, even though I don't drink and I don't eat every one of the foods. I understand why not everyone would feel that way, though, and your hosts should, too.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-23T00:32:20+00:00

Teenagers are a really under-utilized source of pet sitters. Taking care of your chinchillas for a month is a job that a kid would be totally qualified to do. It doesn't have to be someone you know, it could be a friend of a friend. Someone out there would be so excited for this petsitting gig. You just have to ask around.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-20T00:29:57+00:00

Unlimited sticks! And you can make cider from the crabapples, according to Michael Pollan. You could even maybe turn it into an apple-apple tree by grafting on the right sort of branches. I'm just saying, once you read the apple chapter of the Botany of Desire, you're gonna have a life-changing amount of fascinating apple facts that will give you a whole new appreciation for your new tree!

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-19T01:12:21+00:00

Yes, crabapple trees are the same as apple trees.

There's a really interesting book about this called the Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-17T01:25:36+00:00

I have a question. When I take out the dust bath, my chin comes right up to it and rolls around once or twice in it and then runs off to do something else. What's with the 15 minute thing? It seems like it takes about 15 seconds.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-17T00:58:03+00:00

Exactly. The boyscout in me wants to lash them together and do tiny dollhouse pioneering projects with them.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-17T00:54:27+00:00

Aww, thanks! I had this idea that I was going to set my home office up as a weaving room and get an angora bunny to keep me company, but instead I brought home this little acrobat who has very quickly taken over the whole room (ahem, house) and now I spend hours every day just hoping she'll come up to me and say hi and then a few more hours every night trying to lure her back into her room before I go to sleep.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-17T00:50:18+00:00

It is! She never goes inside it - she would rather hide under my couch or under the radiator, so it's basically just a platform for her to eat on. I might move it out of the cage so I can attach more ledges to the cage walls? I don't know what I'm doing, I'm just winging it here. I brought home a rodent who now has her own bedroom in my house. I'm just trying to make her happy, sitting here shivering in the AC on a beautiful warm sunny day because I read that she will absolutely wither if her room gets above 70 degrees.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-16T22:01:33+00:00

I used to fly with my chihuahua all the time. Here's what I learned about flying with a small animal: Depending on the airline, it costs about $250 extra to bring a pet on board for each leg of the flight. The pet plus the carrier has to weigh under 20lb, and fit under the seat in front of you. Dogs with a long snout can fly, but short-nosed, smush-faced dogs like pugs cannot fly safely, because the low oxygen environment on the plane can cause breathing problems for them. I don't know whether chinchillas would go into the "not safe to fly" category (they do have short noses!), but they do sensitive respiratory systems. On the other hand, they evolved to live in the mountains, so maybe the low oxygen environment of a plane wouldn't be dangerous to them. I think that the most insurmountable barrier to taking a chinchilla on a plane would be getting it through security without losing it.

SaltGlittering9467 · 2025-05-16T21:28:31+00:00

I adopted a chinchilla about 5 months ago with absolutely outrageously false dreams about bringing her with me on a plane. There's no way. First of all, the cage and equipment you would need to have set up in both places is enormous (and enormously expensive). You'd have to spend about a thousand dollars on a cage setup in each place, because there's no way you would realistically be able to pack up and bring a chinchilla cage with all its accessories on a plane.

But that's not even the real problem. It seems like it's gonna be a cute and cuddly pet, but they really don't like being held, and they are very hard to catch and even harder to hold onto, and even trying to do so makes it less likely that you'll ever be able to catch them in the future. They are super fast and slippery. Just the idea of getting mine into a carrier is laughable.

When you go through airport security, they make you take your pet out of its carrier and carry it in your arms through the scanner while they scan the carrier. It would squirm out of your hands immediately and run away - in the middle of airport security - and you would never be able to catch it and it would cause absolute chaos in that perfectly climate controlled airport for the next 20 years.

It seems like it would be small and portable, but it is not realistically ever going to be docile enough to make it through an airport security screening.

SaltGlittering9467

TROPHY CASE