Dress British Think Yiddish: program

program

Showing posts with label program. Show all posts

It's been a few weeks since I have posted, which is never a good sign on a blog. Life has gotten unexpectedly, and, to an extent, unpleasantly busy.

I am in preproduction of my play "Shaina," which I will post more about this week. I also had some stupid and embarrassingly trashy apartment problems. Without being too specific, people were using the parking lot outside our window for drug deals, and we discovered some of these same people were squatting in empty apartments in our building.

Additionally, I have started a new project, which I felt like I needed to do, as I was getting a little burned out on Yiddish. But when you do things that take a lot of time, that time must be borrowed from somewhere.

I have continued to study my Yiddish flashcards, but have taken a break from adding new ones. This is actually something I have been considering for a while. I have about 5,000 flashcards, and that's plenty for basic communication, but I barely know many of them. I have been thinking it might be worthwhile to stop plugging in as many new cards as fast as I can and concentrate on learning the ones I have already added.

So this is what I have been doing. It reduces the amount of time I spend on Yiddish from an hour-plus per day to a half-hour to 45 minutes, which is manageable. I think I will soon get back to adding in flashcards from my grammar book, because I want to be able to use the words I have effectively, but for the moment it has been a tremendous relief not to commit to so much time every single day, even if I have only really cleared up half an hour or so.

There also gets to be a point where you try something for a while and then revisit the experiment. I have always known that, studying on my own, Yiddish would be of limited practical value.

The American Jewish community has an affection for a hundred or so Yiddish words that is used as a sort of flavoring, but not much interest in Yiddish beyond that. There are a few dedicated Yiddish cultists, and there are communities of Haredi Jews who use Yiddish as a vernacular, but they are largely located in New York. There just isn't much opportunity for me to use Yiddish in a day to day way.

Knowing this, and knowing that things are not likely to change for me, I have to ask myself what degree of commitment I wish to continue to have to studying Yiddish as a vernacular, as I have been doing.

I don't have an answer for that. I genuinely love the language, and I love studying it, and so I think there will always be a place for continuing to do so. And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that one should not make decisions when one is feeling a little burned out.

I develop interests sometimes that I pursue for a little while, and then I lose interest and just never really return to the subject. But there are other things where my interest wanes, and then returns, and then wanes, and so on. These are things that I continue to revisit for my entire life.

Yiddish has been one of those things since I was a teenager. And I know if I got frustrated now and stopped studying, in a year or so I would regret it, because my interest would return and I would find myself frustrated that I forgot so much of what I spent a year and a half studying.

I think it would help me to learn some tools for maintaining what I have learned when my interest cools, so that I don't have to start over again from scratch when I regain interest. And I think it would help for me to learn how to pare back a little when I start feeling burnout, instead of just pushing ahead, because that it one thing that is guaranteed to make me walk away from something completely.

So, for now, I will just continuing reviewing existing flashcards until I feel motivated to add new ones, which could be in a few days or could be longer.

I'm also kicking around the idea of studying another language, but am not ready to add that in yet. I feel like my Yiddish studies have given me tremendous tools for acquiring language, and it might help me to start learning a language that is actually used as a vernacular, so I can get some practice with a language that I can actually use.

It would probably be Spanish, which I have studied in the past, but who knows? One of the things that first got me involved with this Yiddish project was reading books by self-educated poly-linguists, and the idea of speaking a number of languages was very exciting to me.

We will see, though. As I said, I am very busy right now, and sometimes you have to respect how limited your time is.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 462 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 298 hours
I have reviewed 5,090 individual flashcards

Tomorrow is my 49th birthday. I started this project like I start all my projects, from a fairly absurd declaration that I then try to live up to. In this case, I decided that I thought all Ashkenazi Jews should be able to speak Yiddish by the time they are 50.

This is a product of my own experiences, where, when I was younger, I would sometimes find myself in the company of older Jews who would, on occasion, spontaneously and comfortably switch into speaking Yiddish -- sometimes a word or two, sometimes a sentence, sometimes complete conversations.

I don't know how fluent they actually were. I used to play guitar, and I was pretty good at it, but I would go to guitar stores and watch others sit down and play something utterly astonishing. Sometimes these people were genuinely terrific guitarists, but sometimes they were okay guitarists like me who had a few really impressive tricks. I had a few really impressive tricks too, and am sure when I ran through them people thought I was much better than I was.

So it is with everything. It's hard to gauge competence, especially when you are comparatively incompetent. Maybe I know enough Yiddish now so that the younger me would have been impressed.

I have a year left until I am 50, and I will be curious as to my comfort with the language then. It's starting to click for me, to an extent. Words come easier to me when I want them, and I am able to construct fairly complicated thoughts out of the words I know. I increasingly understand Yiddish when I hear it spoken, or at least some of it -- enough to get the gist of a sentence. I know my grammar is poor -- I mostly built sentences as though I were speaking in English. But not entirely. I have now memorized or partially memorized may 500 phrases and proverbs, and I find myself building new sentences out of them, and those new sentences are presumably closer to how they would be said in Yiddish.

I have always had an image in mind when working on this project -- me at age 50 sitting in a deli reading a Yiddish newspaper. I'm not sure where that image came from, but I am a long way away from it. While my oral Yiddish skills are coming along apace, my literacy is probably dreadful, because I never work on that. I panic at seeing Yiddish in small print, because it's so small and there are so many Yiddish words, and so I never do any reading at all.

I must rectify this. I probably know enough Yiddish now to be able to read children's books, and most of my English acquisition came through reading; I don't know why this wouldn't also be the case with Yiddish.

I shall have to make plans to address this. I don't actually have anybody to speak Yiddish with just now, but I can always have a relationship with a book.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 454 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 288 hours
I have reviewed 5,001 individual flashcards

Through sheer force of will, I have gotten myself back on track. I suppose I'm just learning the discipline of learning a language.

Discipline is hard to acquire. I've only got a few place in my life where I am really disciplined. I'm a disciplined writer, in the sense that if I sit down in front of a blank computer screen I know that within an hour or so I will have written somewhere in the area of 600 to 1,000 words. It's a discipline I had to develop as a journalist, although I am not disciplined enough to do my writing early; I typically do it on the day it is due.

I suppose every discipline is made up of many smaller disciplines. In writing, you have to learn the discipline of writing when you don't want to write, revising when you don't want to revise, writing when you are uninspired, writing when you don't have any idea what you're going to say, and the discipline of not hating your editors, which may be the hardest discipline of all.

In learning Yiddish, there are similarly a series of disciplines, some of which I have acquired, some of which I still struggle with. There is the discipline of constantly creating new flashcards. There is the discipline of creating flashcards containing words other than Yiddish slang for sexual activities. There's the discipline of actually studying the flashcards. There's the discipline of trying to locate gaps in your study and fill them. There's the discipline of caring that there are gaps in your study since all you do with Yiddish is talk to your dog. There is the discipline of not spending all your free time playing with your dog and getting back to studying. And don't even bring up video games.

Anyway, it helped to reshuffle my schedule a little. I now wake at 6:30 or 7 a.m., so am not as exhausted to the extent I was -- it's amazing how much an extra half hour or so can help. Instead of reviewing flashcards first thing in the morning, I review them on the bus to and from work, during my lunch break, and then before I got go to bed, which seems to work about as well.

I'm back to just finding words at random in the dictionary, but when I was last doing this, I was trying to be sort of fair to my dictionary. If I opened it to the page where I had already picked a few words, I flipped around until I find a page where I have learned no words at all. That was starting to take a lot of time, so I have gone back to being loosey goosey about the whole thing.

I am also working my way through a grammar book, as I mentioned, and continue to plug in a Yiddish homily or folk expression or proverb every other day, so there is some nice variety to my studies. I may get back to plugging in text from "Say It in Yiddish," which has turned out to be the collection of the dullest sentences ever conceived. Still, they are well-constructed Yiddish sentences, and it is useful to have a lot of those memorized.

I have made one shift in how I study that I would like to mention. It's small, but I feel like it has been surprisingly effective. It used to be that if I came across a flashcard I knew, I would say the answer and then click past the card. Now, even if I know the answer, I review the card five or so times.

This seems to be helping me to cement the flashcards in my old noggin. Otherwise, once I have learned a card, they only get very brief reviews, and I quickly start forgetting them again. I guess this is another discipline of learning Yiddish: spending time with a word you think you already know.

Also, a quick note: I passed 5,000 flashcards this week, which was one of my milestones. I bought myself a whiskey to celebrate.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 446 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 282 hours
I have reviewed 4,919 individual flashcards

I made some progress breaking out of my slump this week. I have received a copy of "Colloquial Yiddish" by LilyKahn and have started plugging lessons from that book. I have also started creating word lists of the sorts of things I talk about for new vocab words, rather than simply finding words at random in the dictionary, which was amusing for a while and maybe will be again in the future.

My word lists began with words about cowboys, because of course it did. I also added in a lot of words related to music, and I have a long time this weekend and think I shall spending it just making lists of words I use and then plugging them into my flashcards.

I think I need to revisit my schedule. I was waking up at 6 a.m. to take out my dog and then study Yiddish, and it has just left me exhausted. I had to stay out later last night and so slept in until 7 a.m., and it was wonderful.

So when to study Yiddish? I have been trying an experiment this week where I study on the bus, in waiting rooms, whenever I have downtime. Instead of studying in one fell swoop, I study in five or 10 minute chunks throughout the day.

This has turned out to work fine, so I think I will continue to experiment with it. It makes plowing through 100-plus words a lot less daunting, and kills time nicely where otherwise I would often be bored.

In the meanwhile, I also bought a new iPod. The last one kept running into memory problems, and so I use the old one pretty much exclusively for my Yiddish flashcards now and the new one for music, video games, everything that would no longer fit on the old iPod.

So I'd better keep this going. My goal is to literally fill up my old iPhone with flashcards. Currently the flashcards use 854 MBs of memory; my iPod has 32 GB total storage. I'm almost at 5,000 flashcards. So my iPod should hold at least 160,000 flashcards.

I reckon by the time I get there I will speak pretty good Yiddish.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 439 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 277 hours
I have reviewed 4,876 individual flashcards

I added no new flashcards this past week. Usually it's the last thing I do at the end of the day, just before I go to bed, but I would reach the end of the day, exhausted, and just not have the energy to plug in 15 new cards.

I know that some of it is that daylight saving time has thrown me for a real loop this year, worse than I remember. I wake exhausted and go through my day that way, fighting sleep at work, and slipping into naps on the bus on the way to and from my job. I will study my flashcards for a while and then feeling my eyes cross and have to sleep for 10 minutes, 15 minutes before I can focus again.

It also doesn't help that I gave up sugary food and caffeine recently. I had to. I am somewhat overweight, have a slight genetic propensity for diabetes, and a biological grandfather who died from the disease. The sugar also kept me on a constant, unpleasant rollercoaster of rising and falling blood sugar, which kept me snacking constantly.

With the sudden drop in caloric intake, my body has probably already run through whatever reserves of glucose it had, and so now I'm ending my day in a deficit. You want this if you want to lose weight, but, boy, by 11 p.m. I am ready to just crawl into bed and be done with the day.

But there is something else going on. It's burnout.

I was in the Lynn-Lake neighborhood of Minneapolis a few days ago and I passed a store there, Schatzlein Saddle Shop, which sells saddled and tack and also a selection of cowboy clothes.

I had wandered into the store years ago, curious about it, and was struck by a red cowboy shirt emblazoned with musical notes. After resisting for a few days, I bought the shirt, and quickly turned into the sort of person who would wear that shirt. I taught myself cowboy songs on ukulele, and taught myself to yodel, and taught myself how to spin a pistol. I even had my own little cowboy show in Omaha for a while.

I missed it. I still listen to country music quite often, and watch cowboy movies now and then, but it was a lot of fun turning myself into a singing cowboy.

There are few things in my life that I sometimes throw myself into, just for the fun of it. I am awful fond of the poppier aspects of mid-20th century horror films — I wrote about horror-themed novelty music for quite a long time, and really enjoyed that.

I found myself thinking about these things. And I found myself missing the fun. Should I dress in cowboy clothes once per week and go to western bars? Should I secretly start a blog about cowboy horror films? What could I do to get the fun back?

And then I realized I was not having fun with the Yiddish project.

Now, this was a momentary thought, and it's not especially true. I had a blast in New York doing various Jewish activities. But, for whatever reason, at that moment, I was ready to drop the Yiddish project. I wasn't sure where I was headed with it. I felt like maybe it had run its course.

I may have just packed too much into too short a time and need to pare back a little. I may also just be tired, and have been sick, and may be struggling with a lack of sugar and caffeine. The next day, I felt better.

But the fact that I have stopped adding new words indicated to me that I'm not getting anything out of that anymore. And of course I am not.

It's an awful lot of work, memorizing words and phrases. It's also tremendously frustrating, as you just keep forgetting what you have learned and must reteach yourself the same information over and over.

And so I am struggling to learn a massive amount of information that, at the moment, I have no practical use for. And because my grammar is so terrible, I can barely use it to put together a sentence to have a conversation with myself.

Nonetheless, I have continued studying my flashcards unabated, which means my burnout isn't so bad that I want to just take a break from it altogether. And thank goodness -- those are the sorts of breaks that people often don't come back from.

It may not help that I work full-time at a Jewish newspaper, which means that I am interact constantly with Jewish content. I may simply have over-Jewed myself a little.

But I think I have reached a moment where I need to come up with a practical application for the Yiddish I have been studying. In the meanwhile, I need to figure out a way to make the flashcards fun again.

Knowing me, it will be something very silly. Maybe something about cowboys.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 431 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 272 hours
I have reviewed 4,876 individual flashcards

I was congratulating myself on managing to study Yiddish last week in New York, and then it all fell apart. Thanks to a combination of exhaustion and an extremely busy schedule, this past week was something of a bust, with me managing maybe 15 minutes of study per day and adding almost no new words.

Some of it was exhaustion, due in part to the onset of a small cold, my third this year, god damn it. (Woe be to you if you hear a child cough in an airport.) Some of it was a busy schedule. Some of it, stupidly, was a little video game I have gotten obsessed with where you solve puzzles to bring new life to a dead garden on an ancient mansion, like a video game version of "The Secret Garden."

But I know some of it is due to the fact that I am a flibbertigibbet, and must constantly find new ways to amuse myself or my attention wanes. Frankly, the fact that I have been able to maintain this project as long as I have astonishes me, because it usually only takes me a few weeks to become distracted by something new.

This means that I need to shake the program up a little. I'm not quite sure how to do this. I've ordered a new grammar book, "Colloquial Yiddish" by Lily Kahn, and if it helps me construct better sentences, I might enjoy that. But I feel like I need to drill down more, to find something that sort-of obsesses me. Something that will make me want to do the busy work of studying, the stuff that's hard and not especially fun.

I'm not sure what that might be just yet. But the thing that has kept this project going has been my ability to refocus when my attention wanes, to make the project fun again. I'll chew on this this week and see what I come up with.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 425 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 269 hours
I have reviewed 4,853 individual flashcards

I was in New York for four days, and managed to study Yiddish on three of them, so I'm fairly pleased with myself. The image above is me on Hester Street, which was sort of a metaphor for me when I started this project: Because I was in Omaha, and there was no real Yiddish community around me, I would create a virtual Yiddish community, which I thought of as my own personal Hester Street.

"Hester Street" is, of course, a 1975 film, largely in Yiddish, written and directed by former Omahan Joan Micklin Silver and based on a novella by Yiddish author Abraham Cahan. It's also a street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and was a center for Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants.

I will be writing about a lot of my New York stuff as separate posts, but I want to just make a note here: There is a great risk in this sort of project of simply giving in to nostalgia, of fantasizing about a past experience of Judaism that somehow seems more authentic than the current version.

I do not wish to do this, and neither do I wish to present New York as somehow being a locus of an older, more authentic Judaism. New York Judaism is one sort of American Jewish experience, and has maintained some elements that are hard to find elsewhere, in part because its Jewish community is comparatively massive.

I am a product of the New York Jewish experience, as both my parents are native New Yorkers and I was a frequent visitor in my youth. But I am also a product of the Midwestern Jewish experience, where we sometimes called delis "dells," and I won't brook having that experience treated as being somehow less authentic.

That being said, there are some vintage Jewish experiences that are just not available to Minnesota Jews. It is not possible to have an Eastern European schvitz -- there are plenty of saunas in the Twin Cities, but they are not that volcanically hot and wet style favored by my ancestors. Local delis do not offer kishka or tongue sandwiches. There is no Yiddish theater.

I hope to be able to recreate some of this here in Minneapolis, and to tell people how they too can recreate it. You may not be able to hire Russian men to beat you with branches where you live, but that doesn't mean you should be denied the pleasures of platza.

I will detail this more in a fuller essay about something called mayn bubbe's tam, or my grandmother's tastes, but for now I will say that as someone who has studied Yiddish in isolation for almost 15 months, it was nice to see a play in Yiddish, and to meet with Yiddishists, and to hear Yiddish in the wild, on the streets.

Judaism is not really something you do in isolation, but instead as part of a community. Language is the same thing. And so it is worthwhile once in a while to go someplace where a community exists that is doing the sort of things that I do in isolation, to see what it looks like, to experience what it feels like, and, perhaps most meaningfully in Judaism, to taste what it tastes like.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 430 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 266 hours
I have reviewed 4,821 individual flashcards

I'm going to New York this weekend and won't be lugging my massive Schaechter dictionary with me, but I don't want to have four days in which I add no new words to my collection of flashcards, so I have been working ahead, plugging in as many words as possible.

I think I have added enough to cover me during my trip. Now the challenge will be to see if I can actually peel away the time to study. Although there have been few days in the past 15 months I have failed to study, I have not been faced with the challenge of being in a city as distracting as New York. If I can manage to study there, I suppose I can manage to study anywhere.

I'm going out to New York for a few reasons. The first is that I haven't had a proper vacation in quite a long time and I am overdue. I've been back in the Twin Cities for five months, amazingly, and the move was stressful, as moves always are. I have been settling in at my new job, which has involved a steep learning curve, as happens with a new job.

We have mostly been homebodies since we moved back, largely because it is very cold in the winter and its wise just to curl up someplace warm. But it is starting to warm up, and I am starting to settle in at my job, and it is time to relax a little.

"Relax" may be the wrong word. I will be running around Manhattan a lot. I decided to take this trip, in part, because there is a Yiddish production of "God of Vengeance" and how can I do this project, be a playwright, be producing a Yiddish-themed play, and not take in some Yiddish theater?

There is also a lot of old-school Jewish stuff in New York that I cannot do in Minneapolis -- no tongue sandwiches, no Russian baths, no Yiddish newspapers. So I'll be peeking in on a lot of that stuff, as well as the sorts of things I have grouped in as part of my Jewish identity but are more peripheral. I will be going to a Ukrainian museum, as an example.

I will also likely hit a few Irish bars, although I have done a lot of tours of Irish New York.

I'm not sure why I haven't done this sort of deep dive into Jewish New York before. I suspect it is because it is already so much of who I am: My parents are native New Yorkers, and so I took frequent trips there when I was a boy. I spent a lot of time in New York delis and the like. But the truth is that as an adult I have spent a lot more time exploring the Jewish culture of Los Angeles, where I lived for six years, than that of New York.

I will probably do more of that on my next vacation, which will probably be to Los Angeles.

Having this blog incentives doing a lot more of this as well, as it gives me something to write about and I enjoy writing about it.

And there's something else. I will probably work it up into a more formal essay at some point, as it's still bouncing around in my bean. But I was reading about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which was an area in the far east of Russian set aside to be a Jewish region, with Yiddish as the official language (along with Russian). It was a disastrous experiment in a lot of ways, and one of the biggest disasters was that participants realized that Yiddish had been separated from Jewish cultural practices, and, as a result was used to propagandize Soviet ideas to young Jews, encouraging their assimilation.

So Yiddish isn't, in and of itself, enough to support a Jewish identity. Without being wedding to other Jewish practices, it can even serve the opposite purpose and help wean Jews away from the Jewish identity.

And what is identity? I guess I have been coming around to the idea that if your identity is internal, it is just a piece of self-identification that exists inside yourself, that you're Jewish because you know you're Jewish and because you feel somehow Jewish -- well, this strikes me as a weak identity, one that can be hard to maintain and is even hard to pass down to the next generation.

It is a stronger identity if you couple that feeling of being Jewish with actually doing things that are Jewish. I suppose I feel this way in part because my father was a research professor, and so I grew up with Behaviorism, which suggests that our internal world is, in large part, created by our external actions, and not the other way around. That we are what we do.

As regular readers of this site know, my Jewish identity is secular and my religious identity is atheist. So I am always looking for Jewish things to do, or to do things Jewishly, that are not explicitly religious. For the past 15 months, this has largely involved learning Yiddish. But language is just one thing, and, on its own, it is not enough, as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast taught us.

So I am going to New York to find Jewish things to do, or to do things Jewishly. I will report back.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 412 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 260 hours
I have reviewed 4,678 individual flashcards

I have mentioned my dog, Burt, in the past. Burt is a rescue dog, and, when we first got him, almost a year ago, he was a mess. He was twice his body weight, he had just had an eye removed, he did not know his own name, he was not really house trained, and, further, he wasn't anything trained.

Burt has benefited from a regular schedule, some of which he made up on his own. For instance, he tends to wake up between five a.m. and six a.m. and demand to get into bed with me, unless he is already in bed with me, in which case he will sometimes jump out of bed, wander for a few minutes, and then demand to get back in.

We feed him twice per day, which was new to him. We walk him four times per day, and try to make his third walk, in the late afternoon, especially long to tire him out, or he will spend the next few hours moving our shoes around, digging tissues out of the garbage to tear up, barking with frustration at the garbage can when he can't get into it, and otherwise getting into mischief.

When we have had to change Burt's schedule, things have gotten chaotic. He's still not clear on why he can't pee inside the apartment, so we need to make sure we stick to his walking schedule. If we take an afternoon nap with him, his early evening mischievousness is magnified, because he has so much energy. He came from chaos, and, without structure, easily reverts back to chaos.

I mention this because it is all true of me too. Well, not the peeing in the apartment, but most of it.

If I don't get to sleep early enough, I wake and cannot focus on studying Yiddish. So I will decide to nap, figuring I can always get back to it. And then I will get back to it too late, and not finish it, and words I am studying will get pushed back to the next day.

The next morning, the amount of Yiddish I must study will be more than I have time for before I must go to work, and so I will put it off until the evening, and I will forget until the last minute, and more words will get pushed to the next day. So I will not add any new words, figuring 200, 250 old words are more than enough for me to do in one sitting, and I won't get them done. So maybe I need to not add any new words for another day?

This was last week. I finally nailed it all down a couple of days ago, getting caught up on my studies, but, man, it took me back. Years ago, it felt like everything had that sort of quality, like everything in my life was a growing avalanche of overdrawn bank accounts, unpaid bills, untidy apartment, incomplete projects.

I did not like it, and, in my late 20s, later than I should have, I set out to change it. It took most of a decade to unlearn bad habits and learn good ones, which was tremendously frustrating, but, as things became less chaotic, I found myself getting more done. I wrote plays and got them produced. I managed to move from being a cashier, which I did throughout my 20s, to being a journalist, which I have done ever since. Like the dog, I needed structure, and, unlike the dog, I had to impose it on myself.

The thing is, old habits don't really go away. I can always feel the chaos creeping at the edges of my world. I know that, without these little, ridiculous tools I use to try to keep my life from going off the rails -- numbered lists of things I need to accomplish, etc. -- my life would go off the rails.

It hasn't been easy fitting Yiddish into all this. It is hard work -- much harder than I expected. It requires at least an hour a day, and, when there is a lot you want to do, seven hours a week is an awful lot to carve out. Worse still, I have mostly made up for the missing time through lack of sleep, and lack of sleep is a great way to let the chaos in.

On the other hand, studying Yiddish has also forced me to be even more precise in how I schedule my day. More than that, it has forced me to think about how I schedule longer stretches of time. I have not been a patient man in the past, and could rarely sustain any single project for a few months, much less a year.

But I noticed over time that the really important projects, the really significant ones, generally took years, and sometimes decades. They took someone committing to the project, and pursuing it, sometimes without any end goal or without any visible accomplishment. They did so because the project itself was valuable enough that it didn't matter if there was any big payout at the end, or where the project was going. It was just worth taking the time to do.

I needed to learn how to do this. In the long run, it is less important that I now know the Yiddish word for maniac (I learned it this morning, and it's maniak) than the fact that I am doing something that is very hard over a very long time period.

Although, that being said, I do like knowing the Yiddish word for maniac.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 405 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 253 hours
I have reviewed 4,633 individual flashcards

So there is a Yiddish word that essentially means "flier" or "broadsheet." It's not a word that has that much use in my world, but in the Haredi world there is a long history of these sorts of broadsheets. They are a cheap, effective, and frequently anonymous way of communicating, and so there will sometimes be wars of opposing broadsheet hangers who launch missive after missive against each other, all hung from bare walls or telephone poles or the like.

For some reason, I stuck this word in my flashcards rather early on, and it has been an irritant ever since. I just can't memorize it.

I want to memorize it, because I like this sort of word, a word that is associated with a specific cultural expression, and, who knows, some day I might want to get into my own broadsheet war. I have made efforts to memorize it, trying various mnemonics and then just trying to force it into my memory by brute force, repeating it over and over again, tens of times, hundreds of times.

None of it worked. The word would pop up in my flashcards and I would draw a blank, and then I would curse myself and consider authoring a broadside directing angry words at my own brain.

Yesterday I was on the bus on my way to work and suddenly my brain said a single word. "Pashkevil," it said. It was that goddamn word.

And I knew it. I knew that I knew it. From that moment on, it would be easy for me to remember it, instead of impossible. And it has been. I just used it with my boss. We published a story he fears might upset the Haredi community, and I told him we'll know we did if pashkevils show up on our door.

I have had this happen before. A word will just spontaneously go from being unmemorizable to unforgettable, and often like this, just by popping into my head at the odd moment. There doesn't seem to be any set length of time either -- I think I have been trying to memorize this word for a year. This is the longest it has taken, and so stands out. I wonder if there are words it will take me two years, three years to learn?

Memory is strange. My father has been complaining about his memory lately. He always had a very fine memory, and now he struggles to remember the sort of things we all struggle to remember. He told me he can't remember the name of the black actor from The Shawshank Redemption, and so he uses his own mnemonic: The Yiddish word for morning, which is morgan. I feel like if he is using Yiddish words to remember English words, he is probably doing all right.

Now, whenever I hear Morgan Freeman's name, I think of Yiddish. Nobody warns you this is going to happen when you start studying a language.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 397 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 248 hours
I have reviewed 4,570 individual flashcards

I wish I could remember studying Hebrew better, because I find myself curious as to how much Yiddish I know after 14 months compared to how much Hebrew I knew after the same amount of time. I feel like a know more. A lot more. But maybe not, as I worked pretty hard at Hebrew and feel like I absorbed it pretty well.

It's almost all gone now, nebekh. I'm unhappy to have learned something and forgotten it, and I am unhappy because I still occasionally need something to compare myself against, just to see how I am doing.

It's not like it used to be, when I started this project and obsessed about metrics. I've somewhat given up on the idea of fluency, and even of the importance of fluency, in favor of a philosophy of indulgence, where I study whatever Yiddish appeals to me and I find useful or enjoyable in my own life.

But there still is a little bit of my brain that thinks, what if? What if this weird, self-directed, cocooned study program I have invented for myself actually is leading to fluency, of a sort. After all, what is language but knowing a lot of words and how to assemble them, and that's exactly what I am studying.

I've been operating under this weird little theory, unproven and based on nothing but a hunch. But my feeling is that if you can convince 1000 Jews to learn 10 words of Yiddish, 100 of them will go on to learn 100 words. And 10 of those will go on to learn 1000 words. And one will go on to learn 10,000 words, which is about active vocabulary of an educated native speaker.

I base this on something completely unrelated to language, and something that is more a rule of thumb than anything that has data behind it. I used to work with a lot of salespeople, and they made a lot of cold calls, which is a frustrating undertaking. They would comfort themselves by telling themselves that it took 10 cold calls to find one person who was interested, and it took 10 interested people to make one sale.

So I have always proceeded with my life under the assumption that there would be 10 disinterested people for every one vaguely interested person, and 10 vaguely interested people for every one person who commits.

This theory might be appealing to me because I am such a flibbertigibbet. I have a need for novelty, so I constantly try new things, do them for as long as I am amused, and then dump them. It's why this blog has so many little projects on it, so that I can move from one to another when my interest wanes. If I try 100 things, there is probably 10 I will do for any length of time, and one I will do regularly.

Yiddish I do regularly. I'm the 1 in 100 in my equation. I don't know why I am doing it, except that I like it, and I don't know where it is headed, except to a collection of 10,000 flashcards in the next year and a half.

It's like I'm inventing a road map to an uncertain destination based on unrelated folk wisdom. But, then, since I have no real destination in mind, this road map works just fine.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 393 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 245 hours
I have reviewed 4,530 individual flashcards

I feel like the hardest part of my project right now is coming up with something to talk about in these weekly progress reports. Most of the time, when people document a project like this, they do it for a year or less.

And, by "people," I mean A. J. Jacobs, who wrote "The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to follow the Bible as Literally as Possible," and has made a career of doing contained, discrete oddball projects, like reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, which took him 153 days.

It's harder to know what to say about an open-ended project, especially when you snap into a groove. I'm still exclusively adding new words from the Schaechter dictionary, and still enjoying it. Yesterday I learned that the Yiddish word for rabies is vassershrek, which means waterfear, which is delightful.

I received a nice couple of emails from a Yiddish scholar in London who suggested I try the Lily Kahn book "Colloquial Yiddish" to study Yiddish grammar, and I think I will do so. The grammar book I am currently using, "Grammar of the Yiddish Language" by Dovid Katz, feels like it is arranged academically rather than educationally; it explains grammar without teaching it.

This has gotten a little frustrating, because the stuff I have been studying just isn't sticking. So I'll put in an order for "Colloquial Yiddish" in a week or two, whenever I feel like I need to get back to grammar, and we'll see how that goes.

In the meanwhile, I feel like I am ready to start plugging in new proverbs again. As I mentioned, I am no longer stalling on them every time I see one, and I'm actually starting to remember a few without having to be prompted.

One day, maybe five, ten years from now, I'll be able to pull them out and use them when a moment requires it. "He thinks he's a big deal," a person will say, and I will answer "A ketz meg oikh kukn ofn kaiser," and they will say "what?" and I will just nod sagely.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 384 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 240 hours
I have reviewed 4,455 individual flashcards

I'm in sort of a groove now of just adding new words in from the dictionary. It's not especially time consuming, it's something I learn relatively quickly, it's enjoyable, and my study time is faster, generally about a half hour compared to an hour when I am teaching myself grammar and homilies and curses and whatever else catches my fancy.

I won't continue to do this exclusively for much longer, but it's nice to have a little roll going once in a while, where I feel like I'm learning something. The other stuff can take an awful long time to really settle into my noodle. There are some proverbs that I've been trying to memorize for eight months or so and, nope, not memorized, not at all.

It's all a bit easier now, though. It used to be that flashcards that had sentences written on them generally gummed up the works. I just couldn't remember them, and would have to repeat them again and again. In the meanwhile, individual words disappeared to the back of the deck as I learned them, and so I was stuck with these sentences that carried over day after day after day, growing and growing, until I'd finally take a day and just work my way through them, sometimes for hours.

That hasn't happened for a while. I seem to memorize new sentences relatively quickly, and remember old ones after perhaps a repetition or two. It took a while -- it just started to happen in the past couple of weeks, in fact, perhaps assisted by the fact that there are not that many new sentences in my deck, so I am not overwhelmed by them.

But it does feel like something has shifted in my head. It used to be that I was simply memorizing sounds. Now they seem like sentences, with recognizable structures and full of words I recognize. It's nice.

I would say, if there is one thing that frustrates me just now, it is that I don't have any of this stuff on the tip of my brain. This isn't especially surprising. Learning language is a bit of a trick, in that you must learn something in two ways. You not only need to have the words buried deep in your head, where it won't be forgotten, but also need to have it immediately available if you need it.

This is a lot easier if you make regular use of a language, especially if you use it as your vernacular. It's a lot harder if you're just studying a language for a half-hour to an hour per day. We'll see, though. An hour a day doesn't seem like much, but I studied language in college and that's about what we ended up doing there, if you count weekends and school breaks. Additionally, college classes went at the speed and addressed the needs of the average student, while my studies feel comparatively supercharged.

I wouldn't say I came out of college a skilled Hebrew speaker, but it was enough for me to have a functional understanding of the language. I studied Hebrew on and off for somewhere near eight years total. We'll see how comfortable I am with Yiddish after the same amount of time.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 379 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 237 hours
I have reviewed 4,408 individual flashcards

About a year ago, I had taught myself a little more than 400 flashcards, and I wrote this: "In your first month of studying using this process, you're going to feel like you're learning a lot very quickly, which is exciting, and in your second month you're going to feel like you have no idea what to do with what you're learning, which is confusing."

I've learned 10 times as many flashcards. I just lapped myself again -- another 400 flashcards since the start of the year. Back then, I was trying to have pretend conversations with myself using a paltry vocabulary and no grammar. I was obsessed with vocabulary acquisition, charting the number of words I learned and comparing it against standard lists of new language learning (Based on that, I now have the approximate vocabulary of a 7-year-old, although I suspect the average 7-year-old is better able to make use of their vocabulary than me.)

I can now have rather detailed, if grammatically awkward, conversations with myself. Today I struggled through an article in the Yiddish Forward. They have a nice feature where you can click a word and get its translation, and I only had to do this maybe a dozen times, and it was all technical language that there has just been no reason for me to learn, plus a few basic words that, at the moment, I couldn't remember. It was slow reading, and I recall being a much faster reader when I was 7, but, then, I haven't practiced it much.

Maybe I should. It's certainly easy enough for me to access the Forward online, their stories are relatively short, and I started this project with an imagine in mind of me as a 50-year-old sitting in a deli and reading a copy of the paper. Might as well get comfortable reading it now.

It's a bit odd to go back and read the early entries, when my studies felt like a race toward fluency. That is such a minor concern of mine now, as I don't think fluency is possible without a community of Yiddish speakers to support it, and I don't know that I will ever have such a thing.

Now studying Yiddish is just the thing I do because I like it. I learned the Yiddish word for airhead a few nights ago, katzenkop, and if I am translating correctly this means "cat-head."which is delightful. I learn for pleasure now, not for usefulness.

But who knows. That could flip in a moment. Although this projects has been pretty similar from the start, consisting of me putting words and phrases on flashcards and then studying them for 45-minutes to an hour per day, the goals of the project have proven to be pure whimsy.

And thank goodness for that. If I didn't indulge my whimsy, I might lose interest. I'm just too flighty to stick to any one thing for any length of time. Somehow I seem to have tricked myself into 14 months of study, which is pretty identical from day to day, just by re-framing my goals.

Perhaps I should come up with a list of goals that I can switch to if I start to lost interest. They need not be reasonable or anything I can accomplish. They just need to keep me interested. Here's a few:

1. Be the first man to speak Yiddish on Mars
2. Get into a screaming argument with an old man, entirely in Yiddish
3. Translate the pornographic novel "Top Notch Nymph" into Yiddish
4. Have a Yiddish seance and try to reach bawdy Jewish comedienne Totie Field
5. Produce a Yiddish radio soap opera called The Rabbi Disapproves

I have a lot of work ahead of me. Forward!

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 372 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 232 hours
I have reviewed 4,349 individual flashcards

Anybody else having a hard time focusing on things nowadays? I can't be the only one who feels the constant need to check in on social media, news sites, etc., to make sure that nothing newly terrible has happened.

I soldier on, though. It helps to have a routine, and mine is as follows:

I wake up at 6 am. Actually, I wake up sometime between five and five-thirty and then try to fall asleep without alerting my dog that I am awake. I always fail, and so he leaps into my bed and demands attention for a while. Sometimes I manage to sneak in an additional 15 minutes of sleep.

At 6 a.m. I take the dog out and then climb back into bed to play video games on my iPod for about 15 minutes. Mostly I check in on a game called Simpsons: Tapped Out, which I have been playing for five years, good God. I think that's longer than I ever watched the show.

It's not a game in the traditional sense, but instead you complete little tasks and as a reward they let you build buildings or add decorations. I recently added both a synagogue and a Wicker Man, so now the place really feels like home to me.

After that, I study Yiddish for 45 minutes to an hour. I go through my flashcard program and try to eliminate all the flashcards for the day. If they are new cards, I must remember them twice; if old, once. If I can't remember a card, I recite it five times. If it has a gender, as I recite it, I combine it with a mnemonic: Male nouns explode; female nouns burn; neutral nouns freeze. So I imagine the thing exploding, burning, or freezing as I say the word. This works surprisingly well.

I must not just get the word right, by the way, but also its gender and, now that I am working with a new dictionary, its plural. Fail to do so? Card goes back in the deck.

I'll tweak my cards as I study them, too. I use images rather than words, and sometimes I can't remember what an image represented, so I'll replace it, or add another image, or a snippet of text as a reminder. Verbs tend to end with an n sound, but there are some nouns that do too, and I always think, what the hell is this verb, so lately I have been marking them as nouns. Flashcards need constant tending.

Then I get ready for work. On my way to work, I usually listen to some Jewish music, or, if I need to clear my head, some country music, which I find unaccountably relaxing. I generally listen to an audiobook on the way as well, a chapter of a book or a short story. I have been listening to I.L. Peretz's stories lately, which I have been enjoying.

I work at a Jewish newspaper, as regular readers know, and have now been here for about three months, apparently. So time flies like a banana, or whatever it was that Groucho said. I do my job, and then I head home or out for the evening. When I find time, I write these blog posts.

At the end of the day, I make some new flashcards. Depending on what I am trying to learn, that can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, and I usually start about 10 p.m. with an eye toward being asleep by 11 p.m., which I always fail at.

Then I go to sleep and dream, as I do every night, of fistfighting the moon.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 366 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 228 hours
I have reviewed 4,292 individual flashcards

It's a few weeks in and I have completed a few items on the 101 Things in 1001 Days list that I created. I joined both YIVO and the Yiddish Book Center, as an example. I set up my computer keyboard to allow me to type Yiddish. Look: ײדיש.

I've gotten started on a lot of my goals as well. I created a Wikipedia page for a Yiddish vaudevillian, Pepi Litman. I bough a collection of Yiddish plays, as I intend to organize local readings of a few of them, and a collection of Yiddish poetry, as I intend to memorize a few of them.

So I've gotten off to a start, and the nice thing about a list is you can just go and check things off. The less nice thing is that it also constantly reminds you what you have not yet done and what you have not yet accomplished, and, for me, reminds me just how little time I seem to have to do anything.

It probably doesn't help that I have an internet addiction, but who doesn't nowadays. I constantly check social media for the latest outrage, and they come with great frequency, two a day, three an hour, five per minute. I bicker with people on Facebook, although I have gotten better about that, and am very quick to block when I feel my dander getting up, which nowadays seems to happen almost instantly.

I have a FitBit, and it tracks how much I sleep. Not much. Last night was four hours and 18 minutes. I managed six the night before, but only four hours and 38 minutes the night before that. I get some naps in here and there -- often on the bus on the way too or from work. Not enough, though.

At least I am still managing to push a steady flow of new Yiddish words into my head. My sleepy, sleepy head.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 358 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 221 hours
I have reviewed 4,218 individual flashcards

My Yiddish studies are just now blessedly simple. I study grammar from a grammar book, as I mentioned last week, and add to my vocabulary from a dictionary.

But what a dictionary! I purchased the enormous and somewhat spendy Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, and it is a delight. The book came out several months ago to considerable general fanfare, as it includes modern words that are typically lacking on other Yiddish dictionary, such as email and transgender.

It was also quite exciting for the Yiddish community, as it is based on the lexical research of Mordkhe Schaechter, who was the paterfamilias of a family of important modern Yiddishists and was himself a tireless proponent of Yiddish as a living, modern language. Schaechter was also somewhat legendary for several boxes of notecards in his private collection labeled "libe," or love.

These were Yiddish words for sex, some of them quite hilarious, as detailed in the article in Forward from 2014. (Sample sentence: "zi hot farflokhtn a koyletsh," which literally translates as "she braided a challah," but in this instance means "he's not getting any.") When this new dictionary came out, I know at least a few people who immediately scoured it for similarly entertaining sex words and phrases.

I started with this dictionary the same way I did my other, just going through it, page by page, to create flashcards. This proved to be tiresome -- the book is so enormous, and so full of precise technical words, botanical names, and words needed only by the painfully erudite, that I only found a word or two per page that I want to learn just now.

So I made an adjustment. I started to just flip through the book at random and jot down one word per page I landed on. My standards are quite simple now: The word must be terribly useful or terribly interesting. I wind up with about equal measure of either type. It is useful to know the way you represent the sound of a sneeze in Yiddish (Akh-tzi, among others, if I remember right), but when you also have the option to learn sex-bomb, you must. ("Secks-bombe," by the way.)

I have also started to compile lists of words I make regular use of, and a couple of times per week I look this up. I started with words for foods, such as pizza and pasta. (Disappointing, the words are essentially the same in Yiddish, although a pancake is called an Americaner latke,) I've been compiling a list of noises we make that aren't really words, but serve a linguistic function anyway, like "hoo boy" and "yowsa." There are versions of this in every language, and I always like to know it. For instance, in Ireland, instead of "um" they generally say "em," and once you know this, you hear Irish people do it all the time.

Anyway, I'm having so much fun with the book that my flashcards have become flooded with new vocabulary, and I have to remind myself to continue to add grammatical rules. I know we are in an era where poorly constructed word salads are all the vogue, but I don't like it, and don't plan to speak Yiddish that way.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 352 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 217 hours
I have reviewed 4,103 individual flashcards

It's a Minnesota winter, which is the worst there is outside of the Antarctic and other desolate places where only hair grass and pearlwort grow. Seriously, it is 5 degrees Fahrenheit in Minneapolis just now. In Novosibirsk, Siberia, which old war movies used to use as their representation of a frozen hellscape, it is 11 degrees Fahrenheit. And this is a relatively balmy January day in Minneapolis. It has gotten warm enough to snow.

That's right. When it falls below zero, it is typically too cold for it to snow. That's something you know as a Minnesotan.

I've been wearing a big fut hat that I like. It looks a little like a streimel and a lot like a spodik, the fur hats worn by Hasids, although it is blonde colored and I think was intended to be worn by women. No matter, it is the warmest thing I have ever owned. The fact that it makes me look like a Polish good luck statue of a Jew carved by someone who has never actually seen a Jew is just icing on the cake.

I threw a little party for myself last week on the one-year anniversary of my starting this project, but it was so cold that only myself and my girlfriend Coco attended. No matter; we met at a British pub and I drank both Red Breast whisky and Old Speckled Hen beer, which are my favorites. So I have been dressing Yiddish and drinking British.

I have started working my way through a Yiddish grammar book, specifically Dovid Katz's Grammar of the Yiddish Language, which he has kindly made available online as a PDF. It's been very helpful.

One of the early book I used in this project was of the opinion that we have a grammar center in our brain that intuitively understands how languages are structured. One need merely write down and memorize a few samples of each use of grammar and that will, for the most part, do it.

If that's true, that grammar center is broken in my brain. I did this, using Katz's book, and it is one of those things I was never able to remember.

In Yiddish, the word "the" changes a lot depending on context. It changes based on the gender of the subject of the sentence, it changes if the subject is singular or plural, and it changes based on the type of sentence. Each have their own specific rules, and they are not intuitive. And while it is bit frustrating to have to stop for a moment and say "was that a dative sentence," it's better than not knowing at all.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 343 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 210 hours
I have reviewed 4,020 individual flashcards

Instead of making a list of my goals for the coming year, I decided to try something more ambitious. There's an online thing, a bit of a fad, called 101 Things in 1001 Days. I won't go into all the details (you can read more on the website devoted to the project), but, briefly, the goal is to create a list of 101 things that can actually be achieved and give yourself 1001 days to complete them.

I've done this a few times, and have never come close to completing all the tasks. As far as I can tell, nobody has -- the web is littered with people's lists, some goals crossed off, most untouched.

But no matter. Years ago, I started to do projects by making a list of 100 tasks that would be required to complete them, and quickly discovered that by the time I had done a half-dozen of the tasks, I had done as much as I needed, more than I needed, sometimes more than anyone else had done.

Through this process, I turned myself from being a cashier in an office supply store into a professional journalist, I went from being a volunteer usher at theaters to being a produced playwright, from maintaining the website for a dental school to being a professional extra in Hollywood. I think any task is possible if you make a clever enough list. In the past year, a clever list moved me from Omaha to Minneapolis and allowed me to switch from being a researcher at a historical society to being an editor at a Jewish newspaper.

The 101 Things list is generally vast and comprehensive. It's meant to be a map of ambition, and people should try to let their ambition be vaulting. "Learn a foreign language" is often a single entry on the list, and I've never seen it be the entire list. Nobody ever completes that one. It's too hard.

I sometimes enjoy looking at people's lists. Because you often discover how few really individual life goals there are out there and how often people simply compile their own version of the list from other people's lists. "Visit Paris" shows up a lot. I have a friend who sometimes says she wants to visit Paris, and otherwise has never expressed any interest in France, or the French, or the French language. That's not to say she doesn't actually want to visit Paris. We all want to visit Paris. But it's a general life goal, something people think they should want but don't actually pursue.

You see a lot of those show up on these lists. Learn to play piano. Read the 100 Best Books Ever Written. Take a photo a day for a year. I have put these on my list in the past, and from my own experience, and from reading other people's lists, these are the things that don't get done. They might get somewhat done -- usually people read a few books or take photos for a few weeks. And that's fine, and worthwhile, and so what if they don't get done?

But the things that do get done are the personal tasks, the ones that people really care about, the ones that they've been meaning to do, or have been desperate to do. The people who majored in French and read about Paris all the time, they're the ones who go to Paris, and there are a half-dozen other French-related tasks on their list. The ones who want to pay down debt? They pay down debt. A lot of it. The ones who want to finish school tend to finish school, the ones who want to get married tend to get married. You see some wonderful changes in life as a result of these lists. Who cares if all 101 get done? The important ones often do.

So now when I make these lists, I try to come up with 101 tasks that mean something to me, that I am more likely than not to do, that are unique and particular to me. This takes a lot of time. This list probably took me two weeks. It's easy to come up with 25 things to do. By the time you reach 50, you're really struggling. And the last 51 are acts of pure invention.

Those are the ones I often like the most. It's my understanding that one of the philosophies of The Groundlings improv troupe in Los Angeles is that real invention doesn't take place until you completely run out of ideas. That certainly was the case here.

It has been a tremendously clarifying exercise. It wasn't until yesterday that I realized I don't know the names of the vowels that are used in Yiddish, which seems like something I should know. It's made me realize that I am at least as interested in Yiddish as a subject of creative exploration as a language. It helped me realize that one of my goals in this projects is to use it as a pretext for travel, and that I have no idea how that might happen. I don't need to figure that out just yet, as one of the benefits of a very clever list is sometimes it produces unexpected and welcome outcomes.

Let me note that I always treat this sort of project as an evolving draft. Some things may be easier to do than I expected, and so I can increase the amount of times I plan to do it. Some things prove to be impossible, or undesirable, and so I don't do them and try to do something else. But, for the moment, here it is, my plans for the next 1001 days.

101 Yiddish Things in 1001 days

Red: Completed
Due date: Sunday, September 29, 2019

LANGUAGE LEARNING (0/20)

Learn 9,000 new words (20/9,000)
Complete one complete Yiddish grammar book (0/1)
Memorize three complete books of Yiddish proverbs, idioms, curses, etc. (0/3)
Attend two short Yiddish programs (0/2)
Take NYU test for Yiddish competency
Read 10 English-language books on Yiddish (0/10)
Find 20 opportunities to use spoken Yiddish (0/20)
Read five Yiddish stories in Yiddish (0/5)
Write 20 personal essays in Yiddish, have them proofed (0/20)
Learn the names of all the Yiddish letters with vowels
Complete another audio course in Yiddish
Create a list of Yiddish words for daily use
Buy Uriel Weinreich's English-Yiddish dictionary and Beinfeld and Bochner's Comprehensive Dictionary and Hakavey's Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary (0/3)
Create comprehensive list of Yiddish programs
Complete Say It In Yiddish
Teach the dog all his commands in Yiddish
Locate a Yiddish pen pal
Participate on Yiddish chat rooms 50 times
Translate 50 articles from Forward
Play three Yiddish board games (0/3)

ART AND CULTURE (0/25)

Watch and write about 15 Yiddish films (0/15)
Read 15 short Yiddish stories in translation (0/15)
Read five Yiddish novels in translation (0/5)
See two live Yiddish play (0/2)
Learn 10 Yiddish songs (0/10)
Listen to 50 old Yiddish songs (0/50)
Listen to 50 new Yiddish songs (1/50)
Buy or commission 10 new works of Yiddish art (1/10)
Create 10 Yiddish stencils (0/10)
Perform Yiddish music 30 times in public (0/30)
Organize 10 readings of Yiddish plays in translation (0/10)
Create three Yiddish puppet shows (0/3)
Attend 10 concerts of Yiddish music (0/10)
Write 30 Yiddish-flavored poems (0/30)
Write 10 fan letters to people working in the world of Yiddish (0/10)
Do two Yiddish seed art projects, submit to State Fair (0/2)
Memorize 10 Yiddish poems (0/10)
Release two albums of new music (0/2)
Pitch three plays to History Theatre (0/3)
Apply for Fringe twice (0/2)
Create a comprehensive list of arts events to apply for
Create a Yiddish-themed game
Read four Yiddish comic books (0/4)
Help fund 10 Yiddish projects (0/10)
Attend five museum exhibits about Yiddish (0/5)

WRITING (0/21)

Write 500 blog posts (0/500)
Write entire 100 Yiddish Words (12/100)
Turn 100 Yiddish Words into a book
Write the Yiddish history of 10 cities (1/10)
Interview 15 Jewish playwrights (0/15)
Write two plays (0/2)
Revise Shaina
Write 30 short stories (0/30)
Pitch 10 stories about Yiddish to professional publications (0/10)
Write 15 songs (0/15)
Do 50 interviews (0/50)
Write 15 alt Yiddish posts (0/15)
Write about 50 albums (0/50)
Create 30 word lists (0/30)
Make comprehensive list of Jewish publications
Pitch 10 stories to Jewish publications (0/10)
Write five more entries on Yiddish slang or cant (0/5)
Write about Lenny Bruce’s use of Yiddish
Create journalists guide to writing about Yiddish
Write and produce a short film in Yiddish
Create and translate 100 Yiddish proverbs for a new era (0/100)

TRAVEL (0/4)

Visit YIVO
Visit the Yiddish book center
Attend Ashkenaz festival
Visit Medzhybizh

EVENTS (0/2)

Host 12 Dress British Drink Yiddish (0/12)
Have Yiddish meet-ups in 4 states (0/4)

PROMOTION (0/10)

Do 15 posts on Yiddish for MetaFilter (0/15)
Create 25 Yiddish pages for Wikipedia (0/25)
Send out 25 press releases (0/25)
Do 12 podcasts (0/12)
Apply for three Rockower Awards (0/3)
Apply for two regional Emmy awards (0/2)
Apply for two Page One Awards (0/2)
Get proper headshots
Apply to have Yiddish Day in Minneapolis
Make Yiddish thank you cards

SOCIAL MEDIA AND WEB (0/7)

Retweet or post to Facebook 100 Yiddish related links (0/100)
Follow 100 people on Twitter involved in Yiddish (0/100)
Create 20 YouTube videos (0/20)
Send out email newsletter 100 times (0/100)
Set up computer keyboards to type Yiddish
Build a blog email list
Update 100 Google translate entries (0/100)

EDUCATION AND CURATION (0/3)

Develop three educational programs (0/3)
Create a display of Yiddish Twin Cities
Create a display of Hebrew Actors Union

ORGANIZATIONS (0/3)

Become a member of Yiddish Book Center
Become a member of YIVO
Become a member of the American Jewish Press Association

GRANTS AND INCOME SOURCES (0/6)

Make a list of possible grants and funding
Apply for State Arts Board folk and traditional art grant twice (0/2)
Apply for two Rimon grants (0/2)
Set up Patreon account
Apply to Jewish Speakers Bureau
Make list of potential speaking opportunities

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 333 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 203 hours
I have reviewed 3,900 individual flashcards

Perhaps it is time I started to summarize my first year. As you can see from the stats above, I have studied Yiddish for 333 days, which is 32 days less than a full year -- which is about right, when you consider that my first year doesn't actually end for a couple of weeks and there were a handful of days when I wasn't able to study.

I have studied for a total of 203 hours, which is more than eight days straight, and that;s just work I have done reviewing my flashcards. If you also count the time spent creating the flashcards and time spent on a Yiddish audio tape I listen to, the total is probably closer to 300 hours, or 12 days straight.

This feels like a lot. It's probably the most concerted effort I have ever put into any one project in my entire life. And yet it is the amount of language a child passively receives hearing native speakers speak in less than two weeks. That's just how it is, and it will always be the greatest barrier for me to true fluency.

So it is. I realized early on in this project that there were going to be limitations to what I could learn and how effective I could be at applying it. One of the things I have been thinking about in the coming year is ways I can make real, practical use of the Yiddish I am learning, and I will discuss that later.

For now, I want to talk about the dictionary. When I started this project, I simply used Google Translate and a word list I culled from a couple of sources. I cannot recommend that. Google Translate does not always provide the correct translation, almost never provides the correct gender of a word, and never provides a decent translation of a full sentence.

I quickly moved on to a dictionary. It's titled "The Yiddish Dictionary Sourcebook: A Transliterated Guide to the Yiddish Language" by Herman Galvin and Stan Tamarkin. I got it at random -- it was the only dictionary in a used book store in Omaha. But I like it.

I don't know that it's especially good. Galvin was a Yiddish speaker, as was Tamarkin, his son-in-law, but neither were linguists, as far as I can tell. The primary intention of the project was to create a transliterated dictionary, but they argued constantly over which pronunciation should be preferred and sometimes picked them at random, according to an interview with the New York Times.

The book gives the gender of a word, which I needed, but does not give the plural, which I also needed. And although it claims 8,500 entries, you can see a sample page I have marked up at the top of this page. I have learned almost every word on the page, and this is true for every page in the book. But I have only studied about 4,000 flashcards, and only about 3,000 of those are vocabulary words (the remainder are complete phrases.) So how can this be?

The answer is that, as with English, one Yiddish word can often have multiple meanings. And so a single Yiddish word, say, onkhapn, will appear under entries for seize, grasp, grap, and get hold. So while the book does have 8,500 entries, it only has about 4,000 distinct words.

That turned out to be perfect for me. It turned out to be just a little more than what I can learn in a year, and I think the selection of words in the book are good, if not always the most scintillating. I will locate about another 100 words from the dictionary, just to round my total number of flashcards off to 4,000 exactly, but then I will move on to a new dictionary.

This new book will be the massive "Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary," and I think if I had started with that, I would have been overwhelmed. There are 50,000 entries in the book. Were I to just go through it, a page a day, as I did with Galvin and Tamarkin's book, it would take me three years to get through the whole thing.

Thanks to "The Yiddish Dictionary Sourcebook," I have a good sense of my own page, and how much I can reasonably expect to learn in a year, and so I can approach this new dictionary with a plan.

The truth is that I am not sure that continued vocabulary acquisition like this is necessarily the most useful thing for me. But, then, this is a hobby for me, and it's my hobby, and I like learning vocabulary words. If I am to continue into the new year, I must make sure to include the stuff that I enjoy, because that's literally the only reason I am doing this project: for the pleasure of it.