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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Fun!, 15 Jan 2005
There aren't many places left in the world where Yiddish is the primary language; exactly why there would be a travel-phrase book like this one is a little bit perplexing to me. Of course, it was published decades ago, and apparently hasn't been reprinted since, so used copies are the way to acquire this little gem. It is organised in the typical fashion on any travel phrase book - basic expressions; greetings and general social conversation; travel expressions concerning hotels, boats, airlines, etc.; useful words about the house; sports, school, professions; and, of course, café and restaurant information. There are also sections for numbers, dates, seasons, and the like. As the introduction states, whenever Yiddish is spoken, it is usually through the lens of dialects - Yiddish not having a solid geographic home in terms of major national or primary language support, the language is (for all its 'traditional' aspects) a rather fluid thing. Yiddish is, unlike English and more like German, fairly consistent in spelling and pronunciation, so once the basic pattern of pronunciation of letters is mastered, the speech is relatively simple to engage. Yiddish has strong Germanic tones despite being written in the Hebrew (Aramaic) script - this phrase book incorporates the original script as well as transliterated pronunciation. Yiddish, like Hebrew, is written and read right to left, but the transliterations are put in left-to-right for ease of English speakers. Yiddish has had a good deal of influence in English through popular use, entertainment and literature, as well as some business and marketplace uses. Yiddish is becoming more popular in recent years, including being used in schools in some parts of North America as an important secondary language. This is a phrase book, not a grammar. It shows the rudiments of pronunciation and provides handy access to ready-made phrases, but does not develop ideas of grammar and syntax, nor does it have any background of history or sociology - like a travel phrase book, it consists of pages of phrases grouped topically, with an index in the back, and sized to fit easily into a pocket. For a more extensive introduction to the Yiddish language, one might combine this with the book Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Yiddish by Rabbi Benjamin Blech. For a travel phrase book, it is a real gem.
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