What textbook is best for introductory Yiddish classes?

The choice of what textbook to use—if any—is often the first decision an instructor makes when planning for a new class. For our inaugural poll of Yiddish language instructors, we asked teachers which textbooks they prefer to use and why.

This question is, of course, colored by Yiddish’s status as “Less Commonly Taught Language.” Whereas “major” languages have a glut of possible textbooks, curricula, and accompanying course materials, “minor” languages like Yiddish have fewer options. The number of textbooks named here is quite small, while the comments of almost every teacher who participated touch on how they deal with the perceived deficiencies of the available textbooks by supplementing with self-made (or other) materials.

Responses to this question often mentioned the kind of classroom the teacher is working in, and how this affects the choice of textbook. Whether one is teaching a university class that meets for five hours per week with students who are essentially students by profession or an adult education course that meets for one hour a week with students who haven’t been in a classroom for 20 years or more greatly affects the learning conditions and goals of the classroom, and as a result the choice of textbook.

Two dominant themes emerged from the responses to the poll: 1) not which textbook one uses, but how to use a textbook in a continuing education classroom versus a university classroom, and 2) College Yiddish: for or against?

In this post we’ll focus on the first question, and turn to the College Yiddish debate next time.

Textbooks in university classrooms versus continuing education classrooms

My own teaching experience includes both the university classroom (first-semester Yiddish at University of California, Berkeley) and evening courses for organizations like Workmen’s Circle. I started teaching Berkeley’s course, which meets for one hour a day, five days a week, with a mixture of enthusiastic undergraduates, graduate students skilled at language learning, and auditors from the community. Transitioning from that environment—where students heard and spoke Yiddish every day, did homework every night, had weekly quizzes, and cared about getting an A at the end of the semester—to the structural limitations of evening courses certainly involved significant changes in my pedagogy.

Perhaps the major change regarding textbooks was that not all of my adult students wanted to learn the Yiddish alphabet. While the Berkeley students approached learning Yiddish like any other language (learning to read, speak, write, and listen), many of the adult students seemed to not quite think of Yiddish as a real language that one could learn. (I got questions including: It has a grammar? It has standardized spelling? Can’t we just learn some funny words?) Some of them also doubted their own abilities to learn a new alphabet. While I certainly took it upon myself to challenge them and push their learning goals, I also had to accept that the learning possibilities of this classroom were different from the university classroom. We met only once a week, and the generally older students might have had a harder time learning new language skills than younger students. While at Berkeley I required my students to learn the alphabet and start reading (however slowly) by the first or second week of the course, such a requirement was simply not suited to the continuing education classroom.

This meant that most textbooks—including College Yiddish, which we used as a core text in the Berkeley classes—were unusable for the evening course, as they either assume knowledge of the alef-beys, or teach the alef-beys in the introductory lessons (and then eliminate transliteration). My solution was at first to adapt supplementary materials I had made for the Berkeley courses, adding transliteration to everything. These included grammar handouts and conversation activities with vocabulary, songs, etc. Needless to say, this was time-consuming.It also meant that even students who knew the alef-beys or wanted to learn it could fall back on the transliteration, hindering their progress reading the original.

In 2011, a better option turned up when Lily Kahn’s Colloquial Yiddish textbook was published. Colloquial Yiddish was perfect for the adult courses in this regard, as the first five units of the book include transliteration and translations of most of the material. Those first five units combined with my own supplementary handouts and activities provided ample material for an eight- or twelve-week evening course. Of course, the hindrance of transliteration for those students who do want to learn the alef beys remains; that is the main reason I would not use this book as a core text for an intensive university class.

Other instructors who have taught adult or continuing education courses for community organizations responded about the differing learning goals and environments of those courses, and the approaches they take to make the most of the classes.