Beginner II Conversational Yiddish for Heritage Learners

Class starts Feb 24 4:00pm-5:30pm

Tuition: $400 | YIVO members: $325**
Students: $215 (Must register with valid university email address)

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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, 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?
This course is for those who took Beginner I Conversational Yiddish for Heritage Learners in fall 2021.

What topics will this class cover?
Topics will include describing plans, an apartment, clothes, food, cooking, etc. We will learn new words, listen to new dialogues, and discuss and retell the dialogues. Students will record their own monologues on the covered topics.

The grammar topics will include: modal verbs, imperatives, "let’s do something," future tense, introduction to past tense; verbs with separable prefixes, pronouns, declension of articles and nouns, diminutives.

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 (including songs, poetry, dialogues, and stories, as well as excerpts from the textbook Colloquial Yiddish by Lily Kahn) digitally throughout the class on Canvas. The audio files for Colloquial Yiddish are available free of charge on the publisher's website here.

Questions? Read our 2022 Spring Classes FAQ.

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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