These pages are dedicated to helping the serious student learn to read Yiddish in the traditional Hebrew characters. This isn’t necessary to learn to speak and understand Yiddish, as our course has YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research) standard transliteration as well as audio for each Yiddish word, but there is a vast world of Yiddish written material available, both in the form of Yiddish books, as well as all sorts of Yiddish magazines, Yiddish blogs, and Yiddish forums on the internet. None of that is available without being able to read Yiddish.

Writing is helpful for communicating on a forum (though you can write in transliteration as mentioned), or maybe you’d like to start your own blog, or compose your own Yiddish poetry. In addition, we’ve found a keyboards that will help you learn to read as well as write. When you type YIVO transliteration in English characters, the Yiddish appears in Hebrew characters on the screen! It’s an interactive way to help you recognize the characters, and make it easier to read Yiddish.  You can see can check those out here: Yiddish Keyboards - Typing in Yiddish - Yiddish Academy

I hope you appreciate these pages! They are an amazing free resource that have taken me hours to put together. They really constitute a mini course to read Yiddish with Alef-Beyz. It's condensed, and you'll have to work hard, but it's all there. Our course is designed to make it easier with more easy to digest lessons. This is more dense, but we still make it fun on the Reading Exercise page.

So give it a try!

Click here for your Yiddish reading basics.