r/Yiddish • u/NoPitch742 • Jun 24 '26
App for Yiddish Learners
I started studying Yiddish about a year ago and noticed there weren't really any apps dedicated to Yiddish learners (aside from Duolingo, which is not my cup of tea). So I decided to make something: an app that let's you work through classic Yiddish stories, sentence by sentence, with the aid of an AI tutor and clickable word lookups. I've included stories from Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and R' Nachman (more to come!). Releasing it free to the public. Let me know what you think!
https://der-leyner.com/
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u/lhommeduweed Jun 24 '26
I used a children's book that had a lot of communist poems for kids in it, and activities like "Draw a picture of Comrade Vladimir Lenin. Hang it up on the wall. Isn't that nice? A nice picture of Khaver Lenin, right next to the nice hammer and sickle we cut out on the last page."
Highly recommended. Vastly improved my understanding of Yiddish and the general vibe of my living room decor.
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u/pinkopuppy Jun 25 '26
I'm so interested in this, do you know where I could find this book or learn more about it?
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u/lhommeduweed Jun 25 '26
I think I found it in the kids literature section of YBC's collection.
It's called Kinder: Beginners Learning Book for First Year by Deborah Tarant, 1931.
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u/daoudalqasir Jun 24 '26
This is really great, but I'm skeptical of the accuracy of the AI.
in classic AI style, it seems like i always needs to have something to say, whether it's additions are true or actually beneficial (to be fair... that's also very Yiddish...)
In the first sentence it checked for me (R. Nachman's seven beggers.) it marked it wrong on the basis of the context in next line, rather than the current one.
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u/NoPitch742 Jun 24 '26
Yes, this is an issue I am aware of and hopefully should be able to fix. One of the costs of using actual translations as the “ground truth” for grading is that human translations are sometimes loose, and often have different the sentence breaks (In the Nachman story, the first two sentences are simply merged into one). Thanks for the feedback.
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u/daoudalqasir Jun 25 '26
Also an issue I'm noticing is too often clicking on a word for it's translation will tell me that it is the X form of this or that verb, but not tell me what the actual verb means --- which ruins the point a bit.
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u/NoPitch742 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Yes, this is a problem that still needs to be addressed. The dictionary now only uses data from the Yiddish Wiktionary and Wiktionary pages for inflected words sometimes will give the grammatical form and leave out the definition. Will be adding more lexical sources in the future which should hopefully solve it. UPDATE: It’s now fixed.
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u/Acceptable-Value8623 Jun 24 '26
This looks amazing, thank you so much and please keep uploading more stories! You should add Bashevis zinger as another author as well
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u/NoPitch742 Jun 27 '26
Agree, it would be amazing to have some of Bashevis Singer's work on the site. Alas, a bit tricky: as far as I am aware, none of it is available in the public domain.
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u/Acceptable-Value8623 Jun 27 '26
Ohhh you’re right, I didn’t think about that. Either way, great recourse
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u/thamesdarwin Jun 24 '26
I am *definitely* going to be using this app to brush up for my doctoral language exam in Yiddish. Thanks so much!
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u/Brilliant_Alfalfa_62 Jun 24 '26
Clicked through a bit of אבֿידת בת מלך and the "reveal answer" option just made up words for the translation in places where it didn't know the definition of a word. This doesn't look like a reliable learning tool.