This past weekend I went on a walking tour of the Lower East Side with YIVO summer students. I will try to write up some more of the tour in coming days, but in the meantime, here’s…
Throughout my life, I have heard how studying a language is a window into another culture. In case this website doesn’t make it completely apparent, I am completely enamored of the study of language. However, I have never felt…
I have been considering what it is about my brain that makes it love language so much. I am just back from a three-day trip to Boston, where I very happily ran a series of seminars in business writing and…
Last night I dreamt I was walking down a street in New York City with a woman around my age, having a conversation in Yiddish. As I talked, I automatically corrected my own pronunciation at one point, replacing a
I continue to enjoy reading Yiddish words and sentences in my Basic Yiddish grammar, which I have now nearly completed, but I also continue to marvel at how much like a grade-school kid I feel when I am…
One of the things on my list of to-do’s for Yiddish was a visit to the offices of the Forward. The Forward has a long history, one important to the modern story of Yiddish and of Jewish life. …
In recent days, books and other resources on German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian have been pouring in. This is not by coincidence: I requested them from publishers in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, too. …
This project has gotten way out of hand. I was supposed to be done in late June 2010, then late June 2011, and now here I am, on the verge of Labor Day of 2013, still going. To be honest, I cannot imagine…
Before I went to bed last night, I was studying 501 Essential Spanish Verbs, from Dover Publications, and before that some French vocabulary, and before that some Italian grammar, and before that some Portuguese Pimsleur—but in the night…
I have my entire adult life studiously avoided books from the For Dummies and Idiot’s Guides series. For Dummies books come from the publishing company Wiley. Launched in 1991, this…
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