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Yiddish beginners | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| alans Newbie Canada Joined 3790 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Studies: Yiddish | Message 1 of 11 13 July 2014 at 7:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Looking to form a beginner's Yiddish group for support and advice.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4689 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 2 of 11 15 July 2014 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Best of luck. Feel free to msg me with any specific questions. There are precious few Yiddish speakers and students
on here AFAIK, but more than zero. I suggest posting more here about your situation, including why you're interested, what your goals are, what your experience with the language is, etc., so that people have more to comment on. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| alans Newbie Canada Joined 3790 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Studies: Yiddish | Message 3 of 11 15 July 2014 at 2:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, my current goal is just to make it to chapter 30 in College Yiddish! Once I've mastered Mount
Weinrich I will feel I am in heaven. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| alans Newbie Canada Joined 3790 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Studies: Yiddish | Message 4 of 11 15 July 2014 at 3:32am | IP Logged | ||
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If anyone got their start with College Yiddish I would be interested in hearing where you went from there.
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| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5409 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 5 of 11 15 July 2014 at 10:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Good luck with Yiddish !
I didn't start with College Yiddish but found it to be a bit dry when I browsed through it later. If you feel the same at some point, Assimil will soon release an English version of Le Yiddish sans peine. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| alans Newbie Canada Joined 3790 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Studies: Yiddish | Message 6 of 11 15 July 2014 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Several people on this site have mentioned Assimil but I don't know what this is.
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| JamesS Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 4216 days ago 20 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, Indonesian Studies: Javanese, German, Mandarin | Message 7 of 11 15 July 2014 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||
Prepare for your life to change! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 8 of 11 16 July 2014 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Welcome to the forum, alans. As someone who is learning a moribund (dead?, dying) Jewish language (despite being gentile), I am looking forward to following your progress. You'll find loads of help here from others who aren't learning your language. Language learners face many of the same hurdles in common. It can also help to have a look at other learners' logs and even,start a log yourself. A log can be a great way to get near real-time help along the way.
Assimil is a course for beginners (and sometimes intermediate) students developed by a family owned French company that covers a lot of languages. It consists of a book with short dialogs in the base language and the target language facing each other. Each individual lesson is only a few minutes long. There are short exercises at the end of each lesson and after every fifth lesson is a review of what you have learned in those five lessons. Some grammar points are explained. Each lesson has audio recordings of the dialogs in the target language. The lessons are designed as almost a graded reader. It is recommended that the course be done passively up until about midway through the course. At this point the student is advised to do an active wave and go back to the prior lessons (starting at the first) and translate the base language into target language (and maybe vice-versa, I'm not sure) along with continuing to advance through the last half of the course. Consensus on the forum is that the courses are better for more similar European languages- Romance, Germanic, than they are for more distant languages. Consensus reports that the course will usually take a beginner from 0 to A2 Level- Common European Framework of Reference for languages . The course, and other learners also say it will take one to level B1 (low intermediate of the same linked CEFR level descriptions). Supporters of Assimil courses think Assimil is so good for several reasons, and I may be leaving out a few here, which I'm sure others will add: 1) Cost effective- a lot of bang for less bucks. 2) Short, bilingual, facing dialogs 3) Graded reader aspect 4) "Grammar-light" 5) Slow and clear speech. 6) All audio in target language 7) A plan- "Passive" and "Active" waves. 8) A lot of vocabulary and phrases introduced 9) Humor- both in dialogs and cartoon illustrations Knocks against the Assimil courses (in general) are: 1) the grammar-light aspect: easily solved by buying a good grammar book or a second course (simultaneously) that features more grammar. 2) Slow, clear speech. My own observation is that even at the last lesson the audio is not quite at native speech speed and still unnatural. 3) It is considered to be less effective for more distant languages and languages in different scripts. 4) Courses for English-speakers are translated from a French base and not originally designed specifically for English-speakers. Sometimes there can be translation errors (not usually enough to make a huge difference though). 5) Lack of sufficient opportunities for drills- solved through other resources. None of these knocks has kept many, many, people here on HTLAL from benefiting hugely from their courses. Assimil is hugely popular for a reason, but it's not for everyone. Have a look for yourself. My biggest complaint is not the course itself but that the hype generated here on the forum by fans of the course often leads beginners to think that Assimil may be all they need to learn the language and this is not true. No one course, no matter how good it may be, will lead to proficiency in a language. That being said, it can be a useful part of a complete learning strategy. Edited by iguanamon on 16 July 2014 at 4:36am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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