Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Yiddish

While searching for a book that explains the Yiddish language for the common person, I came across this book and what a book it is! It entertains and explains not only the language but also the people, places and circumstances that shows how Yiddish came to be. There are colorful examples, jokes and sayings to make anyone laugh! I found this to be quite an entertaining book, even if you have little interest in Yiddish.

It's a series - not to worry.

Say, there's a "Baby Names for Dummies", so what's to kvetch? MY name wasn't in the book, was yours? It's your mother you should be talking to, not us! Once in a while, she'd like you to call, too, or at least write. So, what could it hurt? Your finger, it's broken, is it?

we were disappointed with the content and glossary of this book.
it was fun to skim and read over, but it didn't offer us much of an indept exposure to the most common terms.
we found that most of the words we looked up and were interested in just weren't there.

otherwise, it is easy to read and laid out in an interesting format for skimming.

OK, a little smaltzy, but a mildly fun trip into the beginnings of the Yiddish culture/language adventure. However, had I known that it was all transliteration (and not particularly well done), I wouldn't have bought it. Really, Hebrew letters and a few creative Yiddish fixes for vowel sounds and the right to left business is not that big a deal. You can do it in two weeks starting from scratch, or less. The experience of several generations of American Jews dragged to the Bimah seems to have poisoned everyone's minds about the aleph bet difficulties - small and easily surmounted. Remember, many in the first generations were literate in Yiddish and Hebrew, not to mention Polish or Russian, and learned English on top of that! Also lots of typos both in the text and the transliterations; fortunately I bought a used copy and an editorial fanatic had been through it with a sharp pencil and equally sharp comments. Sheva Zucker's Yiddish - A Textbook for Beginners, Vol. 1 or Zuckerman and Herbst's Learning Yiddish in Easy Stages are better, if you really want to learn.

I found this book informative and humorous, but I do wish it had covered grammar a little more in depth. All in all, though, it's worth having...ROBERT WLADYKA