Buckling down on learning the alphabet has made my Yiddish studies so much more enjoyable! I’m excited. I still have to look up the handwritten versions of certain letters, though. I took pictures, included below, of two sets that…
People learn in different ways. My brain has some tics that I have to work around. I am extremely distracted by the slightest confusion about minor grammatical or other language points. If, for example, I can’t quite make out…
I spent quite a bit of time on the Hebrew alphabet when I was studying Hebrew a year and a half ago, but I never got all that comfortable with it. There were a couple of issues. This Hebrew Book…
I began this project four years and two days ago. In the early days of it, I used to listen to Pimsleur language lessons on my runs. I eventually stopped, deciding it was too hard to do both well simultaneously.…
Last night I started Colloquial Yiddish: The Complete Course for Beginners, written by Lily Kahn and published by Routledge in 2012. Routledge, by the way, has tons of language-learning books. I am not at all a shopaholic, but going…
Yiddish is the seventeenth language I will have studied in four years, and I confess I am a little worn out. I have been collecting Yiddish books for a while now, in anticipation of this segment, but my brain is…
Today, a quiet Sunday and the final day of my Irish studies, I took a trip to the Bronx. I rode the 2 train to 233rd Street, then caught the Bx31 bus to Katonah Avenue in Woodlawn Heights, a heavily Irish…
I haven’t exactly found Irish speakers in New York, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t here. This has been a terribly busy month workwise, and I confess it is one of my most delinquent months for language…
Greetings, dear readers! Last night I gave a presentation about this project at the Brooklyn Public Library. The event was great fun, and I will post video excerpts as soon as possible. Me at the Brooklyn Public Library in Greenpoint …
Sometimes through this site I hear from foreign-language teachers. These encounters make me wonder about ways to engage students, especially more advanced high school students, in language-learning projects that would help connect the classroom to the world around them. A…
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