Although I am not Jewish, I love Yiddish and (I hope) can both
write and speak it. After some year's experience in teaching Yiddish
at the Jagiellonian University I simply got fed up with students (to be
honest, only some of them, many knew on some subjects more than I do)
asking the most stupid questions like Is Yiddish the same as Hebrew?
or Isn't Yiddish some sort of polluted German? and more of the sort
and decided to do something about this.
You are probably not a student but nevertheless you are
entitled to know nothing or almost nothing about Yiddish.
If you are interested see here short introduction.
So I published a booklet Z dziejow jidisz - jednego z jezykow zydowskich
("From the History of Yiddish - One of the Jewish Languages") (Krakow 1992).
The next thing I got fed up with was having to prepare every lesson myself -
there were no Polish books for teaching and learning Yiddish available.
The result of this was Jidysz -
podrecznik nauki jezyka dla poczatkujacych
("Yiddish for Beginners") (Krakow 1995). If you want to know what the book is
like, see an example lesson.
Thanks to my husbands help the book came with a computer
program for learning Yiddish. It contains some simple
exercises based on the contents of the textbook and a
dictionary of around 700 words.
Finally, something for those of you interested in the scientific side
of Yiddish - you may have a look at the a piece of my
Ph.D. Thesis "Yiddish and Polish
Proverbs - Contrastive Analysis Against
Cultural Background" (Jagiellonian University of Cracow 1994).
And now, as a reward for those of you who came so far,
some Yiddish proverbs.