Learn Yiddish online

free interactive course2,000 real sentences works on your phoneVery easy for an English speaker, ~719 hrs

Yiddish is spoken by about 800,000 people. Now overwhelmingly Haredi, transmitted to children and growing, alongside an elderly secular remnant that is not.

On our measured language map, its closest relatives are German, Pennsylvania Dutch and Luxembourgish. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.

Structurally, it is written in the Hebrew script, and the course teaches the writing system letter by letter with pronunciation shown while you learn.

one sentence from the course
Yiddishזי וועטנעמען דעםאויטאָבוס
EnglishShe willtake thebus
split into its working pieces by the course itself, and paired with the English underneath. Tap a piece to light up what it pairs with. Every one of the 2,000 sentences works like this.
800,000speakers
2,000real sentences
1,594patterns discovered
~719hours from English
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Real Yiddish sentences from the course

קומט מיט אונדז.
Join us.
וועקט זיך אויף!
Wake up!
מוחל מיר.
Forgive me.
איך בין צופרידן.
I am happy.
איך קען שווימען.
I can swim.

How the course works

Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Yiddish sentences, aligned with their translations word by word and piece by piece, so you always see how the sentence actually works instead of memorizing flashcards. The grammar is discovered from the sentences themselves, 1,594 patterns so far, and a spaced-repetition quiz teaches it in the order that unlocks the most of the language first. Our measured estimate for reaching conversational level from English is about 719 hours of study. Read how it works.

Learn Yiddish from your own language

Most apps only teach Yiddish through English, if they teach it at all. These starting languages already have a built course, and any other published language can be paired on request:

EnglishArabicCatalanCzechGermanLatinPortuguese (Brazil)Ukrainian

Related languages you can also learn

GermanPennsylvania DutchLuxembourgishLow GermanHunsrikDutchLimburgishFrisian

Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded. The difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.