Beginner I Conversational Yiddish for Heritage Learners (Afternoon)

Tuition: $450 | YIVO members: $350**
Students: $225 (Must register with valid university email address)

This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in Yiddish and English.

Instructor: Alexandra Polyan

Who should take this course?
Students will be beginners who have had some exposure to Yiddish in their lives, and maybe know a word or expression or two, but lack the basics of grammar and vocabulary, which will be provided in this course. No knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet is required, as all written texts provided will be transliterated into Latin characters (and the focus of the course will be conversation as opposed to reading and writing). Likewise, no proficiency in Yiddish conversation is required.

What topics will this class cover?
In this class, students will learn to say hello and goodbye, introduce themselves, ask how someone is, describe family, places, and appearance; and discuss weekdays, colors, clothes, weather, and food.

After listening to the dialogues from Colloquial Yiddish, the class will discuss and retell the conversations. Students will also record their own monologues on the covered topics.

The grammar topics will include: personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, present tense verbs, future tense verbs, modal verbs, word order, numerals, negation, constructions for asking questions, basic adjectives, constructions "there is/ there are (no)", basic prepositions, declension of articles and nouns.

Is knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet required?
No, knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet is not required. All written texts provided will be transliterated into Latin characters (and the focus of the course will be conversation as opposed to reading and writing).

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas. Course materials will include excerpts from Colloquial Yiddish by Lily Kahn as well as songs, poetry, dialogues, and stories prepared by the instructor. The audio files for the textbook are available free of charge on the publisher's website.

Alexandra Polyan holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Institute of Linguistics (Russian Academy of Sciences), is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Jewish Studies (Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University) and a PostDoc Researcher at Regensburg University. Her current research is devoted to Peretz Markish's poetry. She has taught Yiddish at MSU, Project Judaica (Russian State University for the Humanities in cooperation with Jewish Theological Seminary, NY), Naomi Prawer Kadar Summer Yiddish Program (Tel Aviv University), The Worker Circle. In 2012-2017, she was a journalist of Forward Yiddish Radio.

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