Yiddish or Hebrew: Which Should I Learn?

People who ask me whether to learn Yiddish or Hebrew usually have a reason they have not said yet: a trip to Israel, a grandmother's letters, a synagogue, a Hasidic neighbour, a book they want to read in the original. The reason decides the answer, so this page goes by goal. After that it covers what the two languages share, where they differ, and how much one helps with the other.

They are two different languages. Hebrew is a Semitic language, related to Arabic and Aramaic. Yiddish is a Germanic language, a close relative of German, with a large layer of Hebrew and Aramaic words and a Slavic layer as well. They use the same alphabet, which is why they get confused.

By goal

You want to live in Israel, visit often, or talk with Israelis. Modern Hebrew, without much doubt. It is the everyday language of the country: the street, the news, government offices, the workplace. Yiddish is spoken in parts of Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and other Haredi areas, but even there people deal with the rest of the country in Hebrew.

You want to pray with understanding, or read the Torah and the rest of the Bible. Hebrew. If texts are your only goal, Biblical Hebrew goes straight there; Modern Hebrew also gets you a long way, since the alphabet, the roots and much of the vocabulary are shared. The prayer book is mostly Hebrew with some Aramaic. Yiddish helps only a little here: you will recognise some words, but not the grammar.

You want to read family documents. It depends on the document.

• Gravestones: mostly Hebrew, in short fixed formulas. Some, especially from the 20th century, add lines in Yiddish.
• Ketubot (marriage contracts) and gittin (divorce documents): Aramaic, in a fixed legal text.
• Personal letters, postcards, memoirs, Jewish newspapers from Eastern Europe and the immigrant press: mostly Yiddish. Letters are handwritten in cursive, which looks quite different from print; there is a page on reading them.
• Yizkor books (memorial books for destroyed towns): Yiddish, Hebrew, or both in the same volume.
• Civil records (births, marriages, passports): usually not in either. They are in Russian, Polish, German, Hungarian or the language of whoever ruled the town at the time.

If you have a box of letters from Poland or Lithuania, Yiddish is what you need. To see which Yiddish your family spoke, by town and by the words you remember, try Which Yiddish did your family speak?. Gravestones you can manage with a short list of formulas, without learning Hebrew as a language.

You want to talk with Hasidic Jews, or work in those communities. Yiddish. It is the home language of many Hasidic communities in New York, London, Antwerp, Montreal and Israel, and children there grow up speaking it. Hebrew is their language of prayer and study, and in Israel many Hasidim speak both, but family life, the street and the school yard are in Yiddish. Learn the Hasidic pronunciation if this is your goal; see the page on Litvish and Chassidish Yiddish.

You want literature. Both have a great deal. In Yiddish: Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz, Chaim Grade, Abraham Sutzkever, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in 1978 and wrote in Yiddish all his life. In Hebrew: the Bible, the medieval poets of Spain such as Yehuda Halevi, and the modern literature from S. Y. Agnon (Nobel Prize, 1966) to Yehuda Amichai and Amos Oz. Pick the writers you want to read and the language follows.

You want to talk to living speakers. Hebrew has far more of them, of every age. Yiddish native speakers today are mostly Haredi; the older secular speakers are fewer each year. There is also a smaller world of people who learned Yiddish as adults and use it: courses, summer programmes, theatre, clubs, online groups.

What the two languages share

The alphabet. Both are written right to left with the same letters, including the final forms ך ם ן ף ץ. Learn to read one and you can at least sound out the other.

A layer of vocabulary. Yiddish has thousands of words from Hebrew and Aramaic, called loshn-koydesh ("the holy tongue"). They are spelled as in Hebrew, but pronounced the Ashkenazi way, so a Hebrew speaker recognises the word on the page and may not recognise it spoken.

These words cover religion, law, study and a good deal of everyday life (family, money, character), so they turn up on every page of Yiddish.

Where they differ

Grammar. Yiddish grammar is Germanic. It has articles that change with gender and case (דער, די, דאָס: der, di, dos), the verb in second place in a sentence, and a past tense built with a helper verb, as in איך האָב געגעסן (ikh hob gegesn, I ate). If you know German, much of this will feel familiar, and a lot of the everyday vocabulary too.

Hebrew grammar is Semitic. Words are built from roots, usually of three consonants, poured into patterns: from כ־ת־ב (k-t-v, writing) come כתב (katav, he wrote), מכתב (mikhtav, a letter) and כתובת (ktovet, an address). Verbs change for the gender of the person: you say אתה כותב (ata kotev) to a man and את כותבת (at kotevet) to a woman for "you write".

Vowels. This is the biggest practical difference for a reader. Yiddish writes its vowels as letters: אַ, אָ, ע, ו, י and the pairs ױ, ײ, ײַ. Once you know them, you can read aloud almost any Yiddish word you have never seen, except the Hebrew-origin ones.

Ordinary Hebrew text has no vowels. Children's books, poetry and prayer books add them as dots and dashes (nikud), but newspapers, signs, websites and novels leave them out. So the letters ספר can be sefer (book), sapar (barber), safar (he counted) or sfar (a border region), and you choose from the sentence. You read unvoweled Hebrew by knowing the words and the patterns, not by sounding out letters.

Pronunciation of shared words. Yiddish uses the Ashkenazi tradition (shabes, toyre); Israeli Hebrew uses its own (shabat, tora). Many Ashkenazi synagogues still read Hebrew prayers with a pronunciation close to the Yiddish one.

How long it takes to read

Yiddish is quicker to start reading. The letters and their vowel values are learned quickly, and because the spelling is close to the sound, you can read a simple text aloud early on, even when you do not yet know every word. The slow part is the Hebrew-origin words, which you learn one by one.

Hebrew with vowel points is also quick to decode. Reading normal text without vowels is the long part: it depends on knowing enough words and patterns to recognise them on sight, and that takes much longer than learning the letters. Most learners read voweled texts for a good while before unvoweled ones become comfortable.

Your starting point matters more than any general rule. Someone who grew up with Hebrew prayers already knows the letters. Someone who speaks German will understand a surprising amount of spoken Yiddish in the first lessons.

Does learning one help with the other?

Yes, though less than people hope.

• Hebrew first, Yiddish later: you already have the alphabet, and you can read the Hebrew-origin words that hold up most Yiddish learners. You still have to learn Germanic grammar and vocabulary from the beginning.
• Yiddish first, Hebrew later: you have the alphabet and you know many Hebrew words by sight, though with a different pronunciation. Hebrew grammar, and reading without vowels, are still new.

In both directions the alphabet is the real gift. The vocabulary helps a little. The grammar does not carry over at all.

If you want both

Learn one at a time. Two languages started together, in the same alphabet, with the same words pronounced two ways, tend to blur into each other. Start with the one you will use every week, for the goal that is actually in front of you, and add the other once the first one reads easily.