It’s too easy to forget you’re trying to learn skills for real interactions (save, I suppose, for the Klingon students). The pros and cons of Duolingo have been written about ad nauseum you can’t actually become fluent from fifteen minutes a day on the program. I’d dallied with Duolingo in the past-the free app gamifies language instruction in an attempt to build a daily habit out of learning, and succeeds in sucking you in. If I lived in New York, I reasoned, this would be easier-at least in Brooklyn I’d have a shot at overhearing a natural, live conversation in Yiddish. Although last fall, I did successfully completed a basic Yiddish course for beginners, once again through YIVO, when it was over, I found myself wanting more daily practice-while wholly lacking the motivation to create my own little Yiddishland. ![]() Taking a formal Yiddish class seemed like a way to rectify my own internalized ideas and childhood assumptions about the language. And a substantive part of my graduate thesis centers around understanding Yiddish as a full language that’s been used to say all sorts of things-not just as a vocal exercise in nostalgia or as the tongue of the past. Yiddish has always felt like a language within my grasp, by virtue of having an everyday speech style littered with words like oy and schmooze. Spoiler: Duolingo might just have saved it. ![]() My Yiddish education, I feared, was starting to look like a series of false starts. But, I had to cut my time with YIVO short thanks to an unexpected pandemic-related crisis. Of course, by mid-March 2020, the trip was off the table I spent a frantic few weeks trying to recoup my losses and secure a place in YIVO’s summer Yiddish immersion program online. Last spring, I was finalizing the details for a planned research trip to Poland, expecting to spend my summer learning Yiddish at the Center for Yiddish Culture in Warsaw in between visiting the Warsaw Ghetto Archives to shore up my graduate research on Jewish partisans.
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