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So I've been going to Yiddish class for a couple of weeks. My classmates -- all of whom are ahead of me (because they've had at least one semester of this before, and I haven't) -- are (1) a graduate student who, I realized today from a picture on the front page of the Post website, looks a little like Tzipi Livni; (2) a squeaky-voiced undergraduate, no more than a sophomore, with a tallis and tzitzit, a yarmulke, a bit of scraggly beard, and a stutter; and, on Thursdays, (3) another graduate student who's just dropping by to keep his conversational skills up. The boy, (2), is the weakest of the three, but he can read and write the Hebrew alphabet just fine. The girl, (1), is doing great. The extra Thursday guy is, by my lights, more or less fluent. (I'd say he's fluent in Yiddish the way I'm fluent in French -- for those of you who have a sense of my French.)
And then there's me. I think I'm following about 70% of what I hear, from the combination of facts that I've had some experience learning languages, I've had some exposure to German (thank you, JS Bach) and formal training in other Germanic languages (mainly Old English) and other languages with cases, and the teacher is very good about speaking at what I'm going to call a YSL level, slowly and with illustrative gestures a lot of the time. I can follow along with one finger on the text when others are reading out loud, but if I lose my place it's a couple of sentences before I find it again. I can answer simple questions if I'm asked them slowly, or better yet twice, or better yet after someone else has already answered them and I'm just the next one to take a turn. I can make notes so I'll remember things later and not have to ask again, but I'm making the notes transliterated into Roman letters.
On Tuesday I was finally asked to read out loud, and I could do it, but very slowly, sounding everything out like a second-grader. (Full disclosure: I have absolutely no memory of learning to read English, so when I say "like a second-grader" I suppose I mean "like a second-grader who has to be taught to read with phonics or some such method". I must have had a sounding-out period when I was learning to read Cyrillic at 18, but I don't really remember that either.) I always think it's healthy for -- well, for people like me, the educationally fortunate, to have experiences like that, showing us at least a little bit of what it must be like to be an illiterate adult, so I didn't much mind the spotlight. But it did make it clear that I'm going to have to get proactive, in my abundant spare time, because I'm not going to catch up by osmosis.
So this evening I went back to Lesson 1. (In class we are on Lesson 15.) By myself in my living room I read the whole lesson out loud, and I wrote out all the answers to all the questions. Previously I'd taught myself to write the alphabet by consulting a chart and copying out whole lines of single letters -- like a second-grader again, maybe, but which I absolutely do remember having to do in Russian, and which was very helpful then -- and have been practicing recognizing them by following along with others' reading, like I said. Now I'm on my own, but even by the end of the lesson I was doing better with the reading, and by the end of the written exercises I was doing better with the writing. At least I think so. I'm certainly doing the same thing each time, so if I'm making the letters wrong, at least I'm doing so consistently. I'll hand in my Lesson 1 exercises tomorrow and float the idea past the professor of doing a lesson or two each day until I'm caught up with the others; I haven't been doing the same written assignments as they've been doing (fortunately I registered pass/fail), and she said it was okay to pick up when I felt ready, and last time she said she was going to give me special simpler assignments until then, but then she couldn't find the thing she had meant to give me [g]. So she'll look at it with a native speaker's eye and tell me if my letters look right.
But at least what she'll be correcting is something I've written, rather than something I've drawn.
And then there's me. I think I'm following about 70% of what I hear, from the combination of facts that I've had some experience learning languages, I've had some exposure to German (thank you, JS Bach) and formal training in other Germanic languages (mainly Old English) and other languages with cases, and the teacher is very good about speaking at what I'm going to call a YSL level, slowly and with illustrative gestures a lot of the time. I can follow along with one finger on the text when others are reading out loud, but if I lose my place it's a couple of sentences before I find it again. I can answer simple questions if I'm asked them slowly, or better yet twice, or better yet after someone else has already answered them and I'm just the next one to take a turn. I can make notes so I'll remember things later and not have to ask again, but I'm making the notes transliterated into Roman letters.
On Tuesday I was finally asked to read out loud, and I could do it, but very slowly, sounding everything out like a second-grader. (Full disclosure: I have absolutely no memory of learning to read English, so when I say "like a second-grader" I suppose I mean "like a second-grader who has to be taught to read with phonics or some such method". I must have had a sounding-out period when I was learning to read Cyrillic at 18, but I don't really remember that either.) I always think it's healthy for -- well, for people like me, the educationally fortunate, to have experiences like that, showing us at least a little bit of what it must be like to be an illiterate adult, so I didn't much mind the spotlight. But it did make it clear that I'm going to have to get proactive, in my abundant spare time, because I'm not going to catch up by osmosis.
So this evening I went back to Lesson 1. (In class we are on Lesson 15.) By myself in my living room I read the whole lesson out loud, and I wrote out all the answers to all the questions. Previously I'd taught myself to write the alphabet by consulting a chart and copying out whole lines of single letters -- like a second-grader again, maybe, but which I absolutely do remember having to do in Russian, and which was very helpful then -- and have been practicing recognizing them by following along with others' reading, like I said. Now I'm on my own, but even by the end of the lesson I was doing better with the reading, and by the end of the written exercises I was doing better with the writing. At least I think so. I'm certainly doing the same thing each time, so if I'm making the letters wrong, at least I'm doing so consistently. I'll hand in my Lesson 1 exercises tomorrow and float the idea past the professor of doing a lesson or two each day until I'm caught up with the others; I haven't been doing the same written assignments as they've been doing (fortunately I registered pass/fail), and she said it was okay to pick up when I felt ready, and last time she said she was going to give me special simpler assignments until then, but then she couldn't find the thing she had meant to give me [g]. So she'll look at it with a native speaker's eye and tell me if my letters look right.
But at least what she'll be correcting is something I've written, rather than something I've drawn.
