The stats:
I have studied Yiddish for 58 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 23 hours
I have reviewed 743 individual flashcards
Because weeks go into months so oddly, this is both the end of my seventh week of studying Yiddish and the end of my second month. At least I am not using the Jewish calendar, with its lunar cycles and occasional intercalary months. I've never been able to quite figure out how the Jewish calendar figures anything out, by, by my reckoning, I would now be finished with my third day and my 18th month.
I suspect I have entered a period of study that I call the churn, and am familiar with from other things I have studied. This is a long period where you just continue to study and study and study and don't seem to be progressing at all. There is this long gulf between just starting to know things, which is exciting, and knowing enough for it to meaningful, and that long gulf can be frustrating.
That's certainly how it feels just now. I know that I am gaining incremental knowledge, much of it useful. As an example, I have started to recognize parts of compound words, and there are a lot of them in Yiddish, and they are pretty fun. There's a Yiddish word,
unter, and it means under. So it gets used in rather obvious ways -- an undershirt is made by combining the Yiddish words for under and shirt:
Unterhemd.
But it's also used in surprising ways. "To sign," like when you give an autograph, is
unterscribn, literally "underwriting." If you're going to bribe someone, the word is
unterkoifn, or "underpaying." I expect being able to recognize this sort of thing will be useful down the road, as a lot of words are built out of combining parts from others words.
I've also realized that plural nouns are going to be a bit of a trick. Yiddish has many ways to make a noun into a plural noun, and they don't necessarily follow any easily remembered rules. Sometimes, Yiddish just sticks an s on the end of a word, as we often do in English. Sometimes, they add an n. Some words are the same whether they are singular or plural. And sometimes the inside of the word changes, as it does in English when we change a mouse into mice.
So the only way to learn the plural for Yiddish words is just to memorize it. I'm not going to start doing that yet, but I'm going to have to at some point.
Another thing I learned this week: When you affix the word "the" in front of a word, the sort of "the" you stick there depends both on the gender of the noun and whether it is plural or not, and it gets a little crazy here. If there's only one of something, and the noun is masculine, you say "der" for "the." If it's feminine, "the" becomes "di." And if it is a neutral noun, "the" is "dos." And you just need to know the gender of a noun, because there are no hard and fast rules for this either. A beard, as an example, is feminine. An ovary, in the meanwhile, is masculine. The mouth is neutral, which is not my experience with mouths at all.
But when it becomes plural, both the masculine and the neutral noun become
dem, which I like, because it sounds like a street tough is saying "them." But a female noun becomes
der. Which I have to assume was a decision made a thousand years ago by people who just thought this might be funny, because it means that when a female noun becomes plural, it takes the form of "the" that we otherwise use for singular male nouns. I'd read some subtle sexism here -- it's as though the language has decided that more than one female nouns are the same as one male noun. But, frankly, it's just too convoluted to be effective as sexism, although that's never stopped something from being sexist in the past.
So I have learned these sorts of grammatical rules, but just learning a rule is next to useless. You need to know how to apply it, and I don't know what the plural for any word is yet, and it will be a while before I learn it. And even if I did, you can't speak a language by building it out of grammatical rules you have memorized. Otherwise, trying to construct a sentence consists of desperately trying to remember the language equivalent of math problems, and that's a slow way to speak.
So this is the grind. It's the time between when you have learned something, the time when you can quickly recall it, and the time when you can make use of it without having to think about it.
And it's not just grammar. This is true with the words I have learned, where I still struggle to remember what they mean. It's true of the sentences I have started to learn, where I barely have the sentences themselves memorized, and am not at the point where I really understand the separate parts of it, or how to take it apart and build a new sentence using the pieces.
I know, I know -- I'm only two months in. The average 3-year-old child has about 1,000 words they can use, and I don't even have that yet. And 4-year-olds know 5,000 words. 8-year-olds know 10,000 words, and have you ever read a book written for an 8-year-old? Not exactly Proust.
Newspapers tend to be written at an 9th grade level, and those 14-year-olds know somewhere in the area of 25,000 words. At the rate I'm going, it would take me 240 plus weeks to learn that many words, or more than 4 1/2 years.
I know I do this too often -- this sort of back-of-the-envelope breakdown of words, ages, and months. I don't expect it makes for thrilling reading, and it's really just a way for me to try to understand the benchmarks to learning, and how much time I can expect it to take.
And, of course, as I have mentioned before, there are different ways to judge proficiency than trying to talk like a 14-year-old. There is something called the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which divides proficiency into three groups, with two levels per group.
So there is A1, as an example, which sounds pretty good, as in America if you're A number 1, you're just about as good as you can be. But Europeans don't care for American English phrases, and so A1 in the CEFR test means you are a beginner. Here's what a beginner can do:
- Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic
phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type.
- Can introduce him/herself and others and can ask and answer
questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people
he/she knows and things he/she has.
- Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.
I should note that I'm not even able to do this yet, so I am somewhere below beginner on this test. The person who is at an A1 level generally has a vocabulary of somewhere between 1200 and 1500 words, so when I have doubled my vocabulary, I'll see how I feel about this.
The highest rating on the CEFR is C2, also defined as mastery or proficiency, and those folks can do the following:
- Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read.
- Can summarize information from different spoken and written sources,
reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent presentation.
- Can express him/herself spontaneously, very fluently and precisely,
differentiating finer shades of meaning even in the most complex
situations.
The person at this level generally has a vocabulary of somewhere between 3500 and 5000 words. Presumably they make due with less words than a 14-year-old because 14-year-olds need to many words to describe dreamy pop stars and to badmouth each other on social media.
So that's a much more reasonable goal -- one that can even be accomplished in a year!
And there's an even more reasonable goal, and it will be my first one. I have never completed my college language requirement, and would like to be able to test out of it. In order to do this, I must be fluent in a language to the point where I can read and listen at the Intermediate-High level and write and speak at the Intermediate-Mid level. At my college, these levels are defined using a different scale, one developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, or ACTFL.
At the risk of getting too wonky, here's the basic definition of Intermediate high level:
Intermediate High speakers are able to converse with ease and confidence when dealing with the routine tasks and social situations of the Intermediate level. They are able to handle successfully uncomplicated tasks and social situations requiring an exchange of basic information related to their work, school, recreation, particular interests, and areas of competence.
I can't find anything that gives a sense of how many vocabulary words this might require, but it does roughly line up with the the B1 level of the CEFF. And that's somewhere between 2,700 and 3,000 words.
That's about 7.5 months, not counting the month I have already completed. So there, after some protracted and probably hideously misconceived math, I have reached my first testable goal: B1 level of CEFF, or the equivalent, in another six months or thereabouts.
And how do I demonstrate my level of competence? Well, the NYU school of professional studies offers a proficiency test in Yiddish. The test is not cheap, and I may have to go to New York to take it, so I won't take it until I feel confident that I have reached the level I want to reach. But I'm going to shoot for six months, and am glad to have a clear goal, and a testable one.
Intermediate
High speakers are able to converse with ease and confidence when
dealing with the routine tasks and social situations of the Intermediate
level. They are able to handle successfully uncomplicated tasks and
social situations requiring an exchange of basic information related to
their work, school, recreation, particular interests, and areas of
competence. - See more at:
http://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/actfl-proficiency-guidelines-2012/english/speaking#intermediate
Intermediate
High speakers are able to converse with ease and confidence when
dealing with the routine tasks and social situations of the Intermediate
level. They are able to handle successfully uncomplicated tasks and
social situations requiring an exchange of basic information related to
their work, school, recreation, particular interests, and areas of
competence.
Intermediate High speakers can handle a substantial number of
tasks associated with the Advanced level, but they are unable to sustain
performance of all of these tasks all of the time. Intermediate High
speakers can narrate and describe in all major time frames using
connected discourse of paragraph length, but not all the time.
Typically, when Intermediate High speakers attempt to perform
Advanced-level tasks, their speech exhibits one or more features of
breakdown, such as the failure to carry out fully the narration or
description in the appropriate major time frame, an inability to maintain paragraph-length
discourse, or a reduction in breadth and appropriateness of vocabulary.
Intermediate High speakers can generally be understood by native
speakers unaccustomed to dealing with non-natives, although
interference from another language may be evident (e.g., use of
code-switching, false
cognates, literal translations), and a pattern of gaps in communication may occur.
- See more at:
http://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/actfl-proficiency-guidelines-2012/english/speaking#intermediate
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