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The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 299 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 180 hours
I have reviewed 3,612 individual flashcards

I promise this will be my last post about moving back to Minneapolis, but I just need to say: Moving is hard, yo.

We're in our new apartment at last, as of Saturday. But that means we are in an apartment crowded with unpacked boxes and one nervous dog -- although to Burt's credit, he seems to be adapting to his new home with alacrity. I haven't completely recovered from my cold, and the move Saturday was a whole day affair, so there was a day or two when I didn't have a chance to study Yiddish, god damn it.

But this should be winding down, and I should be back to something resembling a proper schedule soon enough. I have now been in Minneapolis, and at my new job, for almost five weeks, and am starting to get the hang of the latter.

As far as my studies go, I always feel like I just don't know any words at all, and it always turns out that I actually perfectly know somewhere between 68 and 80 percent of the older words, the ones I learned first and so rarely show up in the rotation of flashcards. So a happy percent of what I have been learning manages to stick, but it feels like it doesn't, because there are so many recent words that I have not yet really learned, and they come up all the time.

In fact, an overwhelming number of my cards are "mature" -- about 2100, as compared to about 1400 "young and learning cards." So, at my worst, I have a vocabulary of about 1700 words that I can reliably access, which seems like it isn't that many words, but, then, there are an awful lot of words that I sort of know -- it only takes a quick review to refresh my memory.

I suspect there will get to be a point where I am less concerned about how many words I have learned and how well I have learned them, but it's really all you have to go on when you're studying alone as a hobby.

At the top of this page is a map of America in the process of voting Donald Trump to be our next president. There are going to be a lot of think pieces about this upset, a lot of hot takes, and a lot of work to be done. But for the moment a lot of us look at this map and see the same thing:

Half of the country hates us.

Trump's victory is the victory of the rise of white nationalism. This was not an election that was based around qualifications, as Trump has none. It was not based around policy, as Trump has none that are clearly articulated, and those he has are mostly the usual sort of plutocratic tax cuts for the the very wealthy. No, his campaign was entirely about demonizing the other. He started with Mexican immigrants, quickly moved on to Muslim refugees, and somehow, by the end of his campaign, had managed to be thoroughly misogynistic, encourage outright racists, nod his head at homophobes, and capped it off with a final ad campaign that was instantly recognizable as an antisemitic dog whistle.

A lot of people are looking at this map right now and thinking that half of America hates them. Pretty much the other half of the country. A little more than half of this country probably feels hated, in fact, as it looks very likely that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

This is a Jewish blog, so let me address a Jewish subject. It's something I have been thinking about a lot lately, and the election of Trump has clarified the subject a great deal for me. And that is the question of being publicly, visibly a Jew in the United States.

It's becoming a hard to time to do that. The rising tide of white nationalism, especially expressed by its activist wing, the alt right, has targeted Jews. Emboldened by Trump's rhetoric, they have become the vanguard of the sort of relentless campaign of harassment pioneered by Gamergate in their attempts to suppress feminist criticism of video games. If you are identifiably Jewish on Twitter, there is a good chance you will, at some point, be subject to gleefully antisemitic language and imagery, increasingly coupled with threats.

And this hasn't just happened in the online world. There has been a rise in real-world antisemitic incidents, including assault, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League.

This troubling trend points to a few things, none of which are surprising to anyone who knows the history of antisemtitism:

1. It is important to note that there are many Jews who are not white. But these incidents remind us that even for light-skinned Jews in America, whiteness is provisional. Americanness is provisional. The ancient mythology of antisemitism has us as rootless others, eternal interlopers whose only allegiance is a clannish impulse toward power and money. This view of Jews never went away, and is enjoying new popularity among white nationalists.

2. Antisemitism is complicated because it simultaneously privileges Jews and punishes them for their privilege. This puts Jews in the unenviable position of being pressed between those who are worse off and see Jews as representatives of privilege and those who are better off and see Jewish privilege as suspect and unearned.

3. Antisemitism is appealing to people with the sort of paranoiac worldview that leads to them seeking out conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, Americans seems unusually susceptible to this sort of mindset, first clearly documented all the way back in 1964 by Richard Hofstadter in his essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Classic antisemitism seems perfectly designed for this mindset, and so we are seeing a revival of popularity of such hoary antisemitic golden oldies as the International Banking Conspiracy, Jews Conspiring Against the Greater Good for their Own Best Interests, and Jewish Ownership of the Media.

I'd like to briefly take a look at Trump's final campaign video, which made use of one of these tropes. The ad took as its text Trump's dark musings in a speech on October 13 in which he opined that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” and that “a global power structure” is in league against the interests of everyday Americans.

The ad made explicit who he was talking about, putting faces next to his statements: business magnate George Soros, Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. All Jews.

Note how perfectly this fits the structure of antisemitism. All three are assimilated and accomplished American Jews (although Soros was born in Hungary). There are no specific charges levied against any of them, only the general accusations that they are in league against U.S. sovereignty. There are no non-Jews including in this roundup of villains, and this cannot be an accident, not with how effectively it positions Jews as suspicious interlopers pursuing clannish, anti-American schemes.

And, for me, this is a reminder that the great American experiment of assimilation has been a failure. Jews can be accomplished businesspeople, the most American of pursuits, as George Soros is. Jews can attend the most WASPy, old money educational institutions, as did Yellen (Yale) and Blankfein (Harvard). And yet all somebody need do is mutter some old accusations and suddenly they are nothing but plotting Jews. Soros is especially a popular demon of the right, as he has undeniably used his power and influence to sway elections -- but so have the Koch brothers. And this is how antisemitism works. Behavior that is unremarkable when done by a gentile becomes suspect when done by a Jew.

I don't know how many actual, active antisemites there might be in America. But I know that half of the country either is incapable of recognizing antisemitism or does not care about the issue, because those people voting for someone who made antisemitism part of his campaign, and has received full-throated, unanimous public support from people who are unambiguously antisemitic.

I am not here to rail against assimilation as a personal choice. I am a big tent Jew, and I think all sorts of expressions of Judaism are legitimate and marvelous and should be celebrated. Hasids would no doubt look at me and see a thoroughly assimilated America Jew, especially since my relationship with Judaism is almost entirely secular.

But assimilation is not simply a personal choice. It is also a tactic, and a deliberate one. There is a long history of Jewish assimilation and opposition to assimilation, but when we talk about it in the modern sense, we are talking about something that started with the Haskala, the Jewish enlightenment. It came at a time when European Jews were increasingly living an urban life, which increased both their visibility and their contact with their gentile neighbors.

Assimilation was specifically developed as a tool for increasingly economic and social opportunities with non-Jews, especially for Jews who were in the upper classes. It was also seen as a tactic for combating antisemitism. Assimilation probably did work in the former case, but, as has repeatedly been demonstrated, was a cataclysmic failure in the latter case. Worse, because of the way antisemitism works, assimilation ends up playing into the idea that Jews are unwelcome interlopers with unearned success. Every step of the way, Jewish success is met with antisemtic pushback.

Jews are not unique in this. Jewish assimilation is a sort of an early precursor to respectability politics, which black communities and gay communities have both wrestled with, among others. There is always a sense that if we could just placate the majority, convince them that we are not so very different, they will accept us.

And yet here it is, 2016, and half of America just voted to essentially elect an orange bellows with the word "hate" scrawled across it. No matter how hard you try to be to be respectable, to fit in, to seem nonthreatening to the majority, they still find space within their mean little hearts to shout "All lives matter," to shoot up a black church, or a gay bar, or to make commercials accusing Jews of being a global conspiracy against the United States.

It's exhausting, it's maddening, it's heartbreaking. But it's something else as well. It is liberating.

Because it means that we can choose to assimilate or not assimilate as we wish. We can be as visibly or invisibly Jewish as we want to be, because it does not make a lick of difference to the dominant majority. Whether we walk around with peyes or in jean shorts, they still are going to put brackets around our names and read to each other from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." No matter what we do, antisemites are still going to antisemite.

Me, I think I'll continue finding ways to be a little Jewier. I always found assimilation to be a bore, and so will continue to look for ways in which I can be publicly, visibly what I am: a busily, noisily, actively, aggressively secular Jew with a particular interest in Jewish cultural expressions and Yiddish.

I suppose that's what I have been doing all along with this blog. But I sort of feel like I need it now more than I did yesterday.

Years ago I stumbled onto a book called "Radiotext(e)," an anthology of essays about the early years of radio. The book was both fascinating and frustrating, as it detailed a wildly experimental era of radio. Because the medium had not developed, had not been monetized, had not been corporatized, radio could be anything that involved the transmission of sound.

This was not the radio I grew up with, for the most part. There were a few eccentricities here and there, from rebroadcasts of radio dramas to the novelty songs found on Dr. Demento's show. But radio had cycled its way down to a decreasing collection of options, including top-40s pop music, very serious newscasts, and, most awfully, the rising popularity of right wing talk radio.

I don't know how long it will last, but this moment, now, the early years of podcasting, recalls the madly experimental early era of radio. I listen to a lot of podcasts, hungrily, thrilled by the variety, the recklessness, the sheer abandon of it all.

So you can imagine I was thrilled to discover a Yiddish podcast recently. Not just Yiddish -- Yiddish and explicitly feminist, called Vaybertaytsh. I can't imagine how large or how small the audience for such a podcast might be, but, then, one of the great pleasures of podcasting is that this need not be a concern. If you wish, you can narrowcast to as small an audience as you wish to reach. How many feminists speak enough Yiddish to enjoy such a program? 100? 1,000? Well, that's the audience, along with anyone else who wishes to listen.

I'm the audience, to an extent. I certainly support the show's feminism, although my Yiddish is just barely good enough for me to catch the drift of what is being discussed on the show. No matter -- my Yiddish will get better, and I can always go back and relisten to the show as it improves, and follow more of the discussion.

I reached out to the creator of the show, Sandy Fox, to discuss Vaybertaytsh.

First, could I get some background on you. I gather from your bio that you're a PhD candidate in American Jewish history at New York University, and that, delightfully, you have studied summer camps. But can you fill me in on a little more of your bio, especially how you got to be interested in Yiddish and where you learned?

I got into Yiddish by accident: I had to take a department exam in a relevant research language, and I had just started to think of changing fields from Israel studies to American Jewish history when my friend Naftali Ejdelman started urging me to spend time on his farm in upstate New York -- Yiddish Farm -- learning Yiddish intensively.

At the time I thought, okay, sounds like a pretty fun, charming way to learn Yiddish quickly, and to knock out this exam -- it’ll be sort of like going back to summer camp, which, of course, I’m always down for. In those two weeks at Yiddish Farm, I fell in love with the language quite unexpectedly, and the interest grew from there. That was three and a half years ago.

How did you come up with the idea for the podcast, and how does goes from idea to actually being a podcast. Is there much of it that is scripted in advance?

I came up with the idea from the podcast because I love podcasts, plain and simple. I don’t just listen to them, though: I sit and dissect them, thinking about what I like or don’t like about the sounds, transitions, voices, and formats. I've wanted to make something in Yiddish for a while now, and I suppose I just naturally gravitated to my favorite medium.

I’ve taken all of the stuff I’ve learned from listening and attempted to combine the good parts of my favorite podcasts to make Vaybertaytsh’s sound and format work for me. (For podcast listeners who are curious, Vaybertaytsh’s sound is most inspired by “Death, Sex, and Money,” “The Heart,” and “Strong Opinions Loosely Held.” I also aim to interview like Terri Gross, but of course that’s an extremely high bar that practically no one can meet). In terms of scripting, I don’t script much in advance, but I do have notes to keep the order in check.

I am interested in particular in your decision to do the podcast entirely in Yiddish. I don't know that I have any specific questions, but it seems to me that you probably have some thoughts on the subject, and I'd be curious to hear those.

There was no question in my mind that this podcast had to be entirely in Yiddish. I’d love to make another podcast someday in English, but in that imaginary scenario, that podcast would probably have little or nothing to do with Yiddish, because I’m just not interested in talking about Yiddish in English. I’m interested in using Yiddish to talk about the world around us, our lives, relationships, histories. That’s how, I believe, a language moves forward.

Your podcast is explicitly feminist. Can you discuss that a little, and discuss how feminism informs your use of Yiddish and your choice of subjects for discussion, as well as how Jewish history and Yiddish inform your feminism? I know there is a long history of Jewish feminism, but I am curious to know if there are explicitly feminist Yiddish models you are drawing from.

Being a Yiddishist and a feminist are two crucial elements of my identity. As I said before, I really didn’t want to make a Yiddish-speaking podcast about Yiddish, so I thought about what I would want to talk about week after week, and how the podcast could be, in some small way, contributing to making this world more just. Combining the two interests and identities seemed rather obvious.

Getting involved in Yiddish has strengthened my feminist resolve, for at least two reasons: firstly, Yiddish led me back into more Orthodox spaces and social situations (mainly at the farm, and in the social extension of the farm in NYC), and though I am fairly observant, I’m committed to egalitarian Judaism for feminist reasons. Facing orthodoxy again after many years (my parents tried orthodoxy on when I was a pre-teen) brought my feminism above the surface.

Secondly, I noticed a certain gender dynamic when I first started learning Yiddish among a lot of the younger Yiddishists I know. Most of my most fluent friends, the people who have been learning or speaking Yiddish for a longer amount of time, are men. My teachers have also been, by and large, male. I found that sys-men's voices were being heard more often than those of sys-women and transfolk. I want to be clear that I’m not pointing fingers -- I love my guy friends who speak Yiddish, and have learned so much from them.

The disparity probably stems from a broader trend of men being more interested in the nitty-gritty of languages. Men are more likely to be hyperpolyglots, too, according to some research I’ve seen. I want Vaybertaytsh to be a space for women, and for feminists more broadly (anyone, regardless of gender identity, can participate, as long as they are interested in creating what can loosely be defined as feminist content) to speak unselfconsciously and be heard, partly to even out that dynamic.

You mentioned your accent in an interview I read, and it struck me that you don't seem to be attempting any sort of classic Yiddish accent, but instead are speaking Yiddish with your own American accent. I like this fact, because as far as I am concerned any accent used by a Yiddish speaker becomes a de facto Yiddish accent, but I wonder if you have any comments on the subject?

Recording alone is a very strange experience. I’ve found that it is extremely hard to put on an accent in a room alone by myself. When I speak to someone else in a natural conversation who does have an accent, I tend to speak a bit differently, a little less American. No matter what, though, I sound American, because I learned Yiddish from Americans who have American accents, even if they do a nice resh and speak a heymish dialect, even if they learned it from the home.

I wish I could tell you that my accent in the episodes stems from some big ideological decision on my part. Though I agree with you that an American accent has it's own legitimacy, I would be happy to have the ability to speak a bit differently. But when you put on an accent, you need someone to mimic. In Hebrew, I can turn on an Israeli accent when it comes in handy, because there’s this whole country of accents to emulate. Whose Yiddish accent can I mimic when 95% of the time I’m speaking to people who also have an American accent?

The thing is though: it's totally fine. Through all the editing and listening to my own voice, I’ve come to really like my Yiddish voice, American and imperfect as it may be. I think the show is making my Yiddish better, which is an added bonus. (I listen to my mistakes and re-record myself when possible, which turns out to be a great autodidactic practice). I hope future contributors and interviewees will also find that they love their own Yiddish voice, even with mistakes and American, Israeli, or any other "inauthentic" accents. It can be a very affirming exercise to just hear your voice and be cool with it.

The podcast is still very new, so I wonder if you have specific plans for the future of it, and to what extent is it an experiment, where you will discover what the podcast is in the process of making it?

It’s very much an experiment. I can tell right now that my personal interest lies interviews and conversations on specific themes, but I’m hoping that other people will bring different types of content to the table. Vaybertaytsh has several new episodes in the works right now, including some that are produced by other people (though I’ll still be introducing and editing them). I find that really exciting. I can’t wait to see what other people come up with!

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 293 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 175 hours
I have reviewed 3,504 individual flashcards

My health finally did something that nothing else seemed capable of: It briefly stopped me from studying Yiddish. I didn't have an especially bad cold, but a bad enough cold as to make concentration impossible. So I took a break of a few days, maybe three days, and now am back to studying again.

This was probably the best week possible for ill health, however, if such a thing exists. It was a short work week, and I was able to leave early two of the four days I worked. This coming weekend, I take everything I own out of storage in my girlfriend's parent's house and movie it into a new apartment in my old neighborhood of Elliot Park, and you don't want to be sick for that. And I had some big tasks at the end of the last week, including opening a new bank account and getting a local ID, and was feeling well enough to get it all done.

I will be glad to be into my new apartment on Saturday. This transition happened both very quickly and has stretched itself out over a longer period than I expected: One day I was in Omaha, the next in Minneapolis, and had to adjust to a sudden change, but I have been living in a spare bedroom for a month, and have had to adjust to being in a long limbo, and both have been stressful. It has been impossible for me to develop anything like a routine, and study benefits from routine. Next week, I should start finding my rhythms again, and I am anxious to have this begin.

I went back and reread many of my earliest entries on this blog, back when I was obsessed with how many words I could memorize and how quickly I could do so. I hoped to learn 3,000 words by the end of my first year, profoundly underestimating how much I could learn. I am now 11 months into studying and have learned something in the area of 3,500 words, and should have learned more than 4,000 words by the anniversary of my first blog post, which my calendar tells me is January 6, eight weeks from now.

When I started this project, eight weeks of study seemed like a mammoth undertaking. Now it seems barely consequential, like I could just lie down to sleep and wake eight weeks later without noticing its passing. I shall try to wrap up several of my projects in the next two months, though, so I can think about what my second year of study will be like. I should have the following finished:

1. I have been working my way through a small English-Yiddish dictionary and am now up to the letter S. I should be done with this by then.

2. I have been writing down Yiddish curses. I should have about 40 by the end of the year and this seems like enough curses for the moment.

3. I have been learning from an audio course called "Yiddish Crash Course" taken from a Kaplan language program. I will be done with that.

That leaves one project to carry over into the new year: That of learning the entirety of "Say It in Yiddish,"which is slow going, as I only teahc myself a few phrases from the book per day, and, at the moment, the phrases all sound like this: "Did I leave my luggage at the airplane and will I need it for the customs officer?"

I know two projects I wish to begin in the coming years. Firstly, I plan to buy the massive "Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary" and use that to continue learning vocabulary, as well as going back and building on vocabulary I already have. My current flash cards do not give the plural form of any word I use, because none of my resources have been very comprehensive about giving plurals, and so I must add that in on every flashcard for a noun that I have already created.

Secondly, I need to work my way through a really good Yiddish grammar book. I have been saying I must do this for 10 months now, so it will be time to stop saying it and start doing it.

I do not know what else I wish to accomplish in my second year of study and I suppose I will have to just make it up as I go along, as I have for my first year. I do feel strongly that my second year should include some creative projects, rather than these faux-academic projects I have been engaged in, but I don't know what those might be.

Well, I have two months to think about it, and I will be in a position to sit and really think about things on Sunday, the day after moving day, when I will no longer be in transit but instead settled in my Elliot Park home.

This is not ordinarily a topical blog, but last night Donald Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes claimed that a Jay Z video "starts off with a crowd throwing Mazel Tov cocktails at the police," and this is just too delightful to pass up. This is especially thrilling as a Minnesotan, because we have a member of the North Stars Roller Girls who calls herself Mazel Tov Cocktail, who hails from St. Louis Park, where, as I live and breathe, I am currently sitting and writing this.

So obviously the time of the Mazel Tov cocktail is upon us, and what would it be?

Firstly, perhaps it need not be stated, but what Hughes meant to say was Molotov cocktail, the improvised explosive device named after Vyacheslav Molotov. He was, if you don't know, the Russian diplomat behind the behind the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that guaranteed no Soviet aggression against the Nazis that lasted all of two years, until the Nazis decided to get aggressive against the Soviet Union by attacking Russia.

Molotov started producing propaganda in support of the pact that was widely mocked, especially by Finns, who suffered bombings under the Nazis that Molotov insisted were food runs. So the Finns started calling Nazi bombs "Molotov bread baskets," and when the Finns started throwing bottles filled with petrol at the Nazis, these were, of course, called Molotov cocktails, because why ruin a lovely food metaphor?

There is a bit of Jewish history hidden here, as Molotov replaced Maxim Litvinov as diplomat, and Litvinov was Jewish. Litvinov was replaced, in part, because the Germans refused to have anything to do with him, calling him "Finkelstein-Litvinov." Stalin then ordered Molotov to purge the ministry of Jews. There are longstanding rumors that Litvinov was later murdered by Stalin in a faked auto accident, although Litvinov's widow denied this; nonetheless, his dismissal marked the start of a growing official antisemitism under Stalin.

Even putting that aside, Molotov's pact with the Nazis kept Russia out of the war for two years, until 1941. So, for many reasons, Jews have plenty of cause for mocking Molotov.

But what should the cocktail be? There already is an actual cocktail called the Molotov, but there is nothing to it: It is vodka with high-proof rum floated on top, and the rum is then set on fire. I think we can do better. For one thing, I think the drink must be served in a bottle to preserve the iconic look of the improvised bomb. I would suggest a Mexican Coke bottle or the like, as wine or whiskey bottles will simply be too large for a single cocktail.

I don't mind the suggestion of starting with vodka, and, as this is a Jewish drink, I would suggest starting with rye vodka, which was the sort Jews were associated with manufacturing in Eastern Europe. I strongly think the drink should preserve some of the flavors of Finland, since they named the thing, and the Finns have something called Lonkero, made by mixing gin with grapefruit soda, so we're going to add in some Fresca.

Of course, all we have now is soda and vodka, and a proper cocktail must have three ingredients or it is, as Peggy Olson says, an emergency and not a drink. This would be the moment when we can really make the drink Jewish, as we should. As it turns out, there is a bit of a hidden tradition in grapefruit cocktails of using cherry as a flavoring -- the sweetheart martini, as an example, combines both. So we're going to put some Cherry Heering in, which will make it a drink your bubbe might have loved, assuming she also loved setting fire to things. I suggest not blending the drink, because then we have the thrill of watching the Heering spread through the vodka like blood through water.

Finally, the drink needs a wick, and, believe it or not, people make wicks to put into bottles (here's an example). I haven't tested this, but the alcohol in the cocktail should be a high enough proof to feed the wick's flame. It is low enough, however, not to be incendiary should the flame touch the drink itself. So just stuff some of these wicks into your bottle and pass them around, still burning. When people are ready to drink, they need merely snuff the wick and down the drink with a hearty "Mazel Tov!"

It's everything I like in a cocktail. It's a novelty, a history lesson, a floor show, and a bottle of booze all in one.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 291 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 174 hours
I have reviewed 3,494 individual flashcards

I have come down with a cold, which is thoroughly unsurprising. Moving from one state to another to start a new job is extremely stressful, and, worse, I have been staying in my mother's townhouse with my dog, my girlfriend, my mother, and her boyfriend, and he has a cough severe enough that he wakes up at night to go downstairs to bark for a half hour or so.

I have been likewise coughing, and achy, and exhausted, and so took a break yesterday from plugging new vocab words into my flashcard program. It's probably for the best, as today was another day when I was swamped with sentences that I have a hard time learning, and so I could have spent an hour or more studying, and that's too much when you're feeling punk. I was foggy enough not to be able to remember words I know quite well, like the numbers. "Acht," I would say aloud, bewildered. "Acht? Acccccchhhhttt?" It means eight.

It occurs to me that I have not spent much time discussing the how-tos of my studies, probably because different things are going to work differently for everybody. As I mentioned, I based my studies on one book that argues that instead of memorizing grammar rules, you should just memorize examples of grammar rules, and your brain will do the rest of the work. This has turned out not to be true at all. There is a Yiddish word, zikh,and it's reflective particle, whatever that means. It must be important, because it shows up in sentences all the time. Ikh lern zikh Yiddish, I am studying Yiddish. Haltn zikh, to persevere. But I'm buggered if I know how to use it properly.

Here is advice I will give, because I am sure others will find it useful: Feel free to go in and change your flashcard if you're having trouble memorizing something. I had a bunch of words for genitals in my collection, but, of course, they are all actually euphemism for genitals, but I put a bunch of cartoon images of actual genitals on my flashcards. As a result, I couldn't remember a blessed thing. Is that supposed to be a schmuck or a schlong? Is that a piege or a knish?

This was solved quite easily by putting an image of the non-euphemistic use of the word: A schlong is a snake, for example, so by having both a cartoonish dong and a rattler on the flashcard, I can remember which version of the word is in play.

Also, if a word is pronounced differently than it is spelled (which especially happens with Hebrew and Aramaic loan words), I go ahead and transcribe the proper pronunciation, because there is no way I will remember it otherwise.

I have to modify my flashcards all the time, in fact. I started this project with just a word list, and it did not identify the genders of the words, and Google turned out to be spectacularly wrong on most of the words. So once I got a better dictionary, I went through and corrected the genders. As it turns out, as with English, a single Yiddish word can mean several things.

For a while I was giving each of those things their own flashcards, but it proved to be impossible to remember all possible permutations of a word when they are scattered across thousands of flashcards and show up once every few weeks. Now I just group all the meanings together on a single flashcard when they are similar: Breg, for example, means coast, shore, edge, and border, and those are all similar enough to go on one flashcard.

However, toyb means both deaf and dove, and those are different enough that they need their own flashcards, and I just have to remember that there are two very different meanings for that one word.

And sometimes I have picked an image that just does not tell me what the word or phrase is. I'll stare at in, utterly befuddled, and when I look at the words I can't remember why I picked the image to go with it. When that happens, I change the image. If I don't immediately know what the image is referencing, it is the wrong image.

As I mentioned earlier, if no image at all communicates the word I am learning, I look for an image that actually has the translation written on it. I have found I quickly ignore the English version of the word anyway and focus on the image.

I had not thought I would have to think this hard about flash cards. I guess you never learn on thing, but instead learn the thing that you want to learn, and also learn the things that you have to learn to learn the thing that you want to learn.

I would have no idea how to say that in Yiddish. There is probably a zikh in there somewhere, but where?

I suspect that language is always discovered in the study of it. You might think you know what, oh, Irish is, and then you study it, and you discover that Irish doesn't have a word for orange, never mind that it is one of the colors of the Irish flag, and this seems to say something about how contrary the Irish people can be, or about how we think orange is a color but others might think it is a yellowish red or a reddish yellow, or that, I don't know, the Irish have a previously undetected color blindness. I don't really know why there is no word for orange in Irish, and maybe they have added one in since I studied the language, which I only did for about four months. Nonetheless, my point is that when you learn another language, you learn things about it that you did not expect.

But, man, Yiddish. I have started to think that Yiddish is not just discovered in the study of it, but invented in the study of it. I know there are college programs that treat Yiddish just like any other language, and teach students with the goal of fluency, just as you would with any other language. But Yiddish isn't any other language, and fluency is just one of many possible goals in the study of the language. And the truth of the matter is, if you're going to study the language in a non-academic setting, you're going to have to decided what sort of Yiddish you want to learn, and then invent that Yiddish for yourself.

I am going to make a list of possible uses for Yiddish. This list will necessarily be incomplete, because language is always protean, and Yiddish, which has developed a robust and growing life as a post-vernacular language, may be more plastic than most. I don't think a list like this can ever be comprehensible, because I suspect the Jewish capacity for invention is unlimited, and so we will always be able to come up with a use for Yiddish that people hadn't considered before.

But I think it is worth looking at some of the uses of Yiddish, because each are going to have their own course of study, and if they are the sort of thing that the Jewish community supports, they are likely to need different sorts of support and different institutions of support. I will try to include examples where I can:

1. AS A VERNACULAR LANGUAGE

As far as I can tell, this is the approach that has the greatest institutional support just now, along with my next example. This is the classic approach to language: Learning it as a means of everyday communication. There are a number of college programs that teach this, as well as online courses, summer programs, and at least one podcast. This is probably the most demanding of the various uses of Yiddish, both because learning a foreign language is a tremendously protracted and time-consuming process, but also because, for most American Jews, there is just not that much opportunity to regularly use Yiddish as a vernacular language.

2. AS A LITERARY LANGUAGE

One need not be perfectly fluent in a language to be able to read and write in it, and there are a variety of institutions that support Yiddish as a written language, including at least one Yiddish-language newspaper, the extraordinary work of the Yiddish Book Center, and a variety of newer publications written in part or entirely in Yiddish. Similarly, written Yiddish is used as a language of historical research, again often in academic institutions.

3. AS A PERFORMATIVE LANGUAGE

There is an unbroken history of Yiddish being a language of performance in the United States, primarily in the form of Yiddish songs and in Yiddish theater, as well as a small but not insignificant number of Yiddish films. I suspect a lot of contemporary performers in Yiddish are not necessarily fluent in the language, but are attracted to its expressiveness, its history, and the creative possibilities it offers. Although these forms do not necessarily have the institutional support that Yiddish vernacular and literary studies do, as far as I can tell they are the most popular and widely experienced forms of modern Yiddish expression, especially regarding Yiddish music.

4. AS A CULTURAL SIGNAL

This is probably the most common expression of modern Yiddish: The use of atomized Yiddish words or phrases in English sentences as a way of signaling Jewishness, like when we say we schlep something rather than carry it. This approach has virtually no formal institutional support, although a large number of popular books on Yiddish seem geared toward this usage, at least tacitly.

5. AS A LANGUAGE OF RELIGIOUS TERMINOLOGY

This also has a great deal of popular if not institutional support, especially among the Orthodox. This is the use of Yiddish words for specific aspects of the religious experience, such as calling a synagogue a shul, describing praying as bentshn, and calling a sexton a shamash.

6. AS A POLITICAL LANGUAGE

Jewish political groups have a history of making use of a few very precisely chosen Yiddish words to signal the Jewishness of their approach, including activist Jewish gay groups who have reinterpreted Yiddish words and phrases to express a modern understanding of the LGBT experience and Jewish feminists who have made use of Yiddish, in part, to discuss the intersection between sexism and antisemitism.

7. AS A LANGUAGE OF COMEDY

This involves both aspects of using Yiddish as a cultural signal and as a performative language, but messily. Some Jewish humorists use Yiddish to signal their Jewishness, while others use it as a sort of hipster argot in the manner of Lenny Bruce, while others use it because they think it sounds funny.

8. AS A DECORATIVE LANGUAGE

Some people just like the way Yiddish looks, and so, on craft and design websites like Etsy, you will sometimes find people who use Yiddish words or phrases as a decorative motif.

***

All of these approaches strike me as more or less valid uses of Yiddish, and only the first, the use of Yiddish as a vernacular language, requires fluency. I suspect most people are interested in several of these approaches to the language, and sometimes they will bleed into each other, or one will encourage another.

The more I discover about Yiddish, the more I think the future of the language will benefit from, and may depend on, encouraging as wide a variety of uses of the language as possible. I suppose my feeling is that the more ways we give people to experience Yiddish as something they can make use of, as something that serves a real function in their life, the more people will see it as a living expression of the Jewish experience and less as the dying language of foreign ancestors.

Let me use the world of nonprofits as a parallel for a moment. When I used to work at a nonprofit, I was forever reading about the ways nonprofits finance themselves, and a lot of it had to do less with seeking new members and donors than with taking existing members and donors and increasing their commitment level.

Perhaps this was because existing members and donors have already enjoyed the benefits of their participating, and so are more likely to support the institution. Or perhaps it is because of the sunk cost fallacy, where people who have already made an investment are likely to increase that investment because the original investment cannot be recovered, and they cannot believe they were foolish to make the original investment, and so they keep throwing good money after bad in the optimistic belief that it will all be worth it.

For whatever reason, it is easier to get increased commitment from people who are already invested than to seek new investors. But the survival of a language, either as a vernacular or postvernacular, requires a lot more than a few extremely dedicated individuals. And so I think we need a mechanism to get a lot of people involved with minimal commitment but maximum rewards, and we need to recognize that people have different interests and different desires for reward. Once we have people minimally invested in the language, we can start encouraging them to increase their commitment.

So the greater variety of ways people have to first encounter Yiddish, make use of the language, and be rewarded for doing so, the larger a group of people who might increase their participation. I know this is true of me: The more Yiddish I learn, the greater commitment I have to continue to learn it, both because my ability to use and enjoy the language increases, and also because otherwise why did I waste all that time?

There is no way for me to guesstimate how likely anyone is to learn Yiddish, how many of those will go on to learn more Yiddish, and how many will go on to learn even more Yiddish. There is not much institutional or even cultural support for Yiddish nowadays, and what there is is often prohibitive,. You're not going to hear much Yiddish in the mainstream institutions of Judaism -- the synagogues, the Federations, the summer camps, etc. In the meanwhile, most Jews cannot pursue a degree program, and many cannot take the time or afford to travel to shorter programs. Few are going to want to join a Haredi community that uses language as their vernacular. And even the day-to-day, slangy use of Yiddish as a Jewish in-language seems to be on the decline.

If Yiddish were a nonprofit, I would say we have the ingredients for a terrifying attrition rate and virtually no opportunity to turn people who are already invested into even more engaged participants. And it's too bad, because there are two things that Jews are really good at: We're really good at finding a place for languages that are no longer vernacular, and we're really good at building institutions.

It shouldn't be too hard, either. There already is an awful lot of Yiddish music around; we just need to commit to supporting it and bringing it into our communities. If we teach literature, teach Yiddish literature, even in translation. If we work in Jewish institutions, ask where we can use Yiddish in those institutions, even in small ways -- gatherings can be called kumzits, students can be called talmidim, etc. (I know there is some concern about institutions being overly Ashkenazi; I will address that in a later post.). If we work at summer camps, we might consider using some Yiddish to describe the camp experience, which is something we did in the past, and we might include Yiddish songs during singalongs. There are a lot of ways we can start putting a little bit of Yiddish back into the Jewish world, if we choose to.

I suppose we just have to choose to.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 284 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 169 hours
I have reviewed 3,426 individual flashcards

My schedule has been entirely catawampus the past week. It's hard to move to a new state, immediately start a new job, live out of suitcases in your mother's guest room, look for an apartment, and take care of a dog, all while desperately revisiting your favorite locations and snapping photos of yourself in front of local monuments. It's a lot to do, and I have been exhausted and felt a little sick the entire time. It will be weeks until this is all settled, and months until I have really found a routine.

So Yiddish has likewise been cata and likewise been wampus, with me studying when I can, and making new flashcards when I can. As a result, I have mostly stuck to the easiest thing for me to do, which is enter new vocab words out of a dictionary I own, This is probably for the best as well -- as I mentioned before my move, I was starting to get overwhelmed trying to learn complete sentences, and my study time had started to spike past an hour of work per day.

It's become quite easy for me to learn individual words, for the most part -- there are always a few that stubborn refuse to get learned, and just show up again and again in my flashcards, forever unmemorized. But there is a certain logic to language, with words constructed out of other words, and once you have learned a few thousand, a lot of new words seem like they are just variations of words you already know.

I do feel that I must start learning Yiddish grammar in earnest soon. I can construct approximations of Yiddish sentences by swapping out words in sentences I already know, but it's limiting, and since a majority of the sentences I have learned are Yiddish idioms or proverbs or curses, they don't necessarily reflect how language is typically spoken. However, that must wait until I am more settled. And I like to complete one project before moving on to another, and I have several projects going all at once now: I am still working my way through a Berlitz audio series, although I am nearly finished with that; I add in a few Yiddish curses every few days; I am memorizing a Yiddish phrasebook, although I have mostly suspended that project until I at least have my own apartment; and I am adding new words from a Yiddish dictionary.

Regarding the dictionary, I would estimate that I add three-quarters or more words from each page, and I am already up to words that start with S, so I will probably have worked my way through the entire dictionary in a month or so. I will then go through and plug in words that I skipped, a few per day, until I have literally added the entire dictionary to my flashcards.

Once I finish with one of these projects, I'll start work on memorizing an entire Yiddish grammar book. I started this project with some bad advice from one of those "learn an entire language in 30 days" courses, which suggested that our brains just automagically decode and make use of the rules of grammar, and I have found this not to be the case at all: Not only do I not generally understand how a sentence is constructed in Yiddish, I don't even know why sometimes we say "nit" and sometimes "nisht," when both mean "not." (I just checked; apparently it is a pronunciation difference and has nothing to do with grammar, which I would never have figured out on my own.)

Learning grammar is, of course, one of the steps toward fluency, and it's one I haven't been in any hurry to do because I both think it is impossible for me to become fluent doing this project and because fluency is not especially interesting to me. I will write more about this soon, but suffice it to say that when you don't care about fluency, it lets you study Yiddish in entirely different ways, and those way are valid and enjoyable.

But here's the thing: I actually do want to be fluent. I can't help myself. As fun as it may be to groan out a Yiddish homily at just the right moment ("A cat can also look at a king" he said, and everybody nodded, agreeing.), I also want to be able to have long, effortless, perfect conversations in Yiddish. I know it can't be done, but I want to do it anyway, and so I will occasionally work toward that goal.

There is nothing wrong with trying impossible things. It's how you get improbable results.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have moved from Omaha back to my home town of Minneapolis. There are a lot of reasons for this. There are some family members with health problems, and my girlfriend and I wanted to be here, especially during the winter, if they had any needs. I have three nephews and a niece and feel as though I have missed a lot of their childhoods, and did not want to miss more. I also have brothers and a parent here, and another parent who is occasionally here and never in Omaha. So there was family.

And there is family of another sort. Both of my biological parents had roots in Minneapolis. My biological father, or, at least, the likeliest candidate for my biological father, still has family here. My biological mother has an ex-husband here and a widower in nearby Wisconsin, and it proved impossible to meet either when I was in Omaha, and will be easier here. I want to petition for my original birth certificate, for two reasons: Firstly, my biological mother was an Irish citizen, and I may one day wish to establish our relationship and seek Irish citizenship myself. Secondly, my name at birth was Baby Boy Monghan, and that's just the greatest name ever, and I want to have documentation of it.

I could talk about my frustration and disappointment with my Omaha experiences, but I will not. Suffice it to say that the town and I were not a good match. Not this time. I had good experiences there in the past, and enjoyed working at the historical society, but I missed a lot about Minneapolis that cannot be found in Omaha.

I was born in Minneapolis but largely raised in St. Louis Park and, later, Minnetonka, two suburbs of Minneapolis. I have returned to the former, in the sense that I now work here. I recently accepted a position as Community Editor of American Jewish World, a local biweekly about the Jewish community that dates back to 1912. I will be writing local culture stories, editing bar mitzvah listings and synagogue service hours and that sort of thing.

My first day here, I passed a group of Orthodox Jews walking along the sidewalk, carrying lulavs and esrogs for the sukkoth holiday. Today, at the end of Sukkoth, I passed a man in a shtreimel and bekishe. It has been a long time since I have seen that sort of Jew, although I used to see them a lot, as I went to a Jewish high school. I was glad to see it. Although I am secular in my religious practice (or lack thereof), I am also not mad about this great American experiment of assimilation. I do not think there is anything particularly magnificent about the American mainstream, which mostly seems to me to consist of men in baseball caps loudly screaming that anyone who isn't just like them should go back to wherever they came from. So, while the Orthodox life is not for me, I do respect their refusal to assimilate.

There weren't so many of them in St. Louis Park when I was a boy. There were some -- I would see them walking to and from shul on Shabbos, dressed in black, the men in fedoras, the women in wigs. There are more now, and there are more of their institutions: shuls, mikvehs, schools. The local Lubavitchers are in the same building I now work in, and I am told they have a small chapel here.

This is the neighborhood that filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen came from, and is where they set their most Jewish film, "A Serious Man," which presents the neighborhood as a Jewish enclave in a larger world of bewilderingly goyish Minnesotans. I don't know how many Jews actually live here, and I think the Orthodox largely congregate around the shuls and a Jewish day school, Torah Academy, formerly my secular day school, then called Fern Hill. I feel like about half my grade school class was Jewish, but that may be an exaggeration. Still, walking around my old neighborhood, and remembering my neighbors, it is mostly Jewish names I remember.

There are a lot of explicitly Jewish memories of this neighborhood, My parents owned a second house in St. Louis Park, which they rented to a man named Mr. Brown, who was my Hebrew instructor at a Jewish High School called Maimonides, at the Jewish Community Center, also in St. Louis Park. Mr. Brown was a nice man with a strong comic sensibility, and he was fascinated by gematria, the Jewish form of numerology that takes the numerical value of Hebrew letters and uses them to create mystical connections between ideas and texts.

Just down the street from my old house was a house rented by an Israeli family, and they sent their son to school with me. I can't remember his name, but I remember he was quite unlike the Israelis I had met before, who were brash and tough. He was small and sensitive and quietly brilliant. I have, in fact, lost touch with everyone I went to high school with, despite it being a very small school (13 total students my first year there), and I have forgotten many of their names. There are some records of the school at the local Jewish historical society, and I may take time later to look at them, see who I remember, and see if they are still around.

Maimonides High School was a relatively short-lived experiment locally -- I think it lasted all of four years. Since coming back, I find myself thinking of it quite often. As happens in high school, it was a place of a lot of firsts for me, including my first kiss. I was also class president, by the way, I think mostly because it was largely a collection of misfits, and I was the most floridly misfit among them. But it was the first time I discovered that there was a place in the world for an oddity like me, and that, in fact, the things that made me feel so odd could, in the right circumstances, also make me a leader.

Anyway, it is both strange and good to be back. I don't know what effect my relocating will have on my Yiddish project or this blog, but it is a very large change, and I am curious to see what happens from here.

In 2014, two Montreal-based writers and performers, Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, began an unusual web series: Yidlife Crisis, which consisted of a series of short comic vignettes, filmed for the web and largely performed in Yiddish. The series has now enjoyed two seasons and has included Howie Mandel and Mayim Bialik as guest stars, as well as expanding to another web series, Global Shtetl, that looks at the international Jewish community.

I emailed Batalion and Elman a series of questions about the show, Here are their responses:

Let me ask how YidLife crisis came about. I know Eli and Jamie went to school together and that Eli was the school's Yiddish valedictorian, but could you walk me through what that means, and how, years later, it leads to a Yiddish web series.

You’re basically correct. Eli’s background involved being surrounded by Yiddish speakers like his grandparents growing up, and then also leaning some Yiddish in elementary school. Jamie came to Yiddish strictly in high school. But being in Montreal, and around various institutions like the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre and Jewish Public Library that put focus on Yiddish, we were both tangentially exposed to it and a seed of sorts was planted vis-à-vis Yiddish, particularly with respect to its use in literature and performance. Later we would begin to discover that there was a Yiddish flavor in a lot of the comedy that we had come to appreciate. When meeting each other later in on life, and deciding to pair up on something that felt special to us, it was specially this notion of a Yiddish-based show that came about as the best idea.

I'm very interested in the process of making the show. How does it get written (especially in Yiddish?) How to you go about finding other actors, and how did you get Howie Mandel and Mayim Bialik involved in the show?

We write in English, work with professional translators to get it into a high level Yiddish, then check that Yiddish flow against how we think it should be spoken and performed given the scene at hand and come up with the best version. We have been supported with grants to date to do this sort of thing. Our actors are either people that are already Yiddish capable that are particularly available in Montreal because of this history that we have in this city, or are just local actors. Howie and Mayim were each people we either had worked with or whose social networks we were somehow entrenched in. We got their attention and had the chutzpah to pitch them on being involved in something, and they both graciously agreed to do so.

I seem to recall that Yiddishists were a bit critical in the first season. How do you address the issues with making sure the show's Yiddish is accurate? How much general interest has there been in Yiddish, and do you think there has been an increase since the show came out?

We’ve taken a more traditional and academic approach to translating the Yiddish in the second season based on this feedback. We generally do like to test it out on a few people, and of course, everyone has their own subtle choices here and there, particularly choosing the better of two permissible choices (e.g. choosing the German or the Hebraic version of a word). The more people we can pass it by, the better, but it’s best to at least start with a more academic version, at least to please the academics!

We’ve recognized a small movement in learning Yiddish, particularly at the college level, but have also seen through our online promotion that there are others that are interested in learning, but just lack the resources with which to do so. Not everyone is capable of attending intensive courses at various institutions, or are aware of them, or have the time to access an online or printed resource. But we would like to think that we have definitely raised the needle for some in terms of awareness of the language and the possibility of picking it up in some way.

Could you talk about Golbal Shtetl for a moment. Did this emerge out of YidLife Crisis? How would you describe the program? You have been traveling around a fair amount -- is that a result of YidLife, and is Glocal Shtetl connected to that?

Global Shtetl is the happy accident of purely YidLife Crisis touring and the desire, as part of our YidLife fueled travels, to be able to capture the adventures we’re going on vis-à-vis the Jewish communities of the world in different continents, countries and cities, often with a focus on Yiddish history and lingering aspects of Yiddishkayt and the Ashkenazic experience. Part of the implied “thesis” of Global Shtetl as per its name is that we’re all sort of still one Shtetl no matter how far we go, and that you will see the same migratory patterns in Canada, the UK, Australia, the US, Latin America, South Africa and of course, Israel. Granted, you’re going to find local variety and there are many complex factors that change the state of what the Jewish community has been and is in all these places, but it’s fun and interesting to find the commonalities, then find the details and points of uniqueness specific to each city.

Finally, I'd love to get a few words about Montreal, which seems important enough to the show to almost be another character. How much of the show is influenced by the specific details of the Jewish community there, and by the essentially multicultural character of the town?

As you can probably already tell, Montreal is a significant source of our content for a few reasons. For one, the Yiddish tradition in the city and the contributions of the Jewish community, particularly in various secular aspects of the city (not the least of which is our smoked meat, now espoused and literally purchased by Celine Dion no less!) Second is the city as a multicultural and multilingual template, a unique gem in North America which in some ways may be a model for more metropolises decades from now but which encapsulates what we think the best version of multiculturalism is, which is when there is fusion and cross-pollinating integration. There is a strong case for that in Montreal. And, since the city literally is where we grew up, amongst its community, it is all the more appropriate to set it there. Of course, we recognize we could easily put the show in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Brookline, Golders Green or many other largely Jewish neighborhoods, but we’re attached to Montreal for creative and personal reasons.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 277 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 164 hours
I have reviewed 3,318 individual flashcards

After five years away, I have returned to my home state of Minnesota and my home city of Minneapolis. I will discuss that in more detail in a later post, as it changes things for me a fair amount, especially regarding my Yiddish studies.

I have somehow been able to maintain my studies through this transition, although I took a week off from listening to the Yiddish language recording I have been working my way through for the better part of a year. I just had too many thoughts going through my little head to focus. There are a lot of details to a move, especially a very quick one, and this was quick: I made the move in a week, for the most part. My girlfriend is still in Omaha with our dog and will be joining me next weekend with most of our possessions.

I have been on the hunt for a new apartment, and am starting a new job, and it is for the best. But I imagine there will be new challenges, chief among them the fact that there is a lot more to do in Minneapolis, and I am easily distracted.

More soon.

The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 270 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 159 hours
I have reviewed 3,223 individual flashcards

I have been on the road a little in the past few months, and may be again for the next few -- mostly traveling back to my home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's a six-plus-hour drive, mostly spent listening to country music, chatting with my girlfriend, and occasionally checking in on our dog in the back seat to see if he is okay. Which he always is. He loves to travel.

But it's hell on my studying. Being on the road, and visiting family, and visiting Minneapolis, can be awfully distracting, and I can't be sure when I will be where and why. When I used to study at night, before I went to bed, I found it impossible to get home in time to study, or I would be too tired. Now that I study in the morning when I wake up, it's a little easier, but there are two parts to studying from flashcards, and the second part is actually creating the flashcards. I found it hard to find the time for that, and so didn't.

I suppose it would not be so bad if I couldn't add new words for a little while and so was forced to review the words I have already added, but I prefer to continue my learning unabated. The only thing I can do is try to take extra time in advance to get ahead on adding new flash cards, which is what I did on the last trip.

I'll note something that makes this especially time consuming. I have gotten to the point when I learn new words relatively quickly, but must revisit new sentences over and over again. My flashcard program, Anki, pushes stuff I have learned to the back, so I need review it less, and pushes stuff I am struggling with to the front, so I must review it more often.

This means that a lot of my current reviews consist of Yiddish proverbs, blessings, curses, and sentences drawn from phrase books. And some of these sentences are very hard to memorize -- I feel like I am learning them anew every single time I see them. This isn't so bad when there are only a few of these phrases per review session, as I can pick them up with a half-dozen repeats. But that's not what's happening. Because there are so many phrases I have a hard time remembering, they tend to dominate my review sessions, and so I must revisit them again and again and again per review session to learn them, because it is so much information I am trying to memorize all at once. I had a review session take me an hour and a half the other day because there were so many phrases, when they usually take me a half-hour.

I suppose the cure for this is to not add so many phrases into my deck. I mean, I added 150 proverbs or thereabouts, perhaps 200 individual phrases, and now a dozen or so curses. That's maybe one out of seven of my flashcards, so of course they were going to start to back up.

We'll see, though. If I keep having days where I must spend an hour studying, I'll pare back. But for the moment, I am seeing real progress on the sentences. There was a while where I felt like I just wasn't learning the sentences at all, because every time they would recur in my studies, I couldn't remember them at all. But now some are old enough that I have seen the reappear five or six times, and I ca feel them growing familiar. Some of the older ones I remember outright, some I must reread once or twice, and a few I struggle with, but it's clear to me that this just requires patience, which is the one lesson life keeps trying to force me to learn and the one lesson I dislike the most.

I am not a patient man.