Yiddish on Duolingo: How the long-awaited course came to be

editor of the fathers welcome to yiddish on duolingo how the long-awaited course came to be duolingo is an american language learning app and website that allows people to learn at their own pace best of all it's free on april 6th it released its yiddish course joining 38 other languages the app has over 300 million registered users across the world and i just discovered that since that date april 6th 230 000 people have already started the yiddish course so we're here to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the course was put together as you'll hear soon it was not an easy process and required lots of debating polling and compromising to get realized so let me introduce you to some of the members of the yiddish duolingo team who will share what it was like myra audi is not a part of the yiddish team but she is lead community manager at duolingo and started out as a german language specialist there 10 years ago she helps language experts use duolingo's tools to create free language courses for everyone leivy pelasik was raised in a yiddish-speaking hasidic home in brooklyn and now lives in florida he came to work on the course over a year ago when duolingo asked his brother slowly if he wanted to work on the course and schooly brought livey onto the team libby pollock also grew up in a yiddish-speaking home in williamsburg brooklyn where her parents were very strict about yiddish being the only spoken language at home these past five years she's traveled extensively to over 30 countries and is now back in new york she did the voice prompts and voice overs and is the main female voice in the program meena visvanath is a civil engineer who lives in rockville maryland she was recruited by recruited by leivy to work on the yiddish duolingo team to help out with issues of spelling and grammar and to make the larger decisions affecting the course for example which dialect should we use what flag or icon would represent the yiddish course so myra i'd like to start with you you've been a duolingo the longest can you tell us what it was like trying to get the yiddish course started as opposed to other courses other languages yeah sure um we started duolingo with this mission to make free education possible for everybody and we started with the largest languages which were spanish for english speakers and english for spanish speakers and only later did it kind of occur to us that that we could really have a wide diversity of courses of language courses on duolingo and it really was a community driven effort so people kind of came came to us as duolingo was growing in popularity and saying well what about what about our language what if we provided the content would you be able to provide the infrastructure and the tooling to create more language courses and the yiddish community was a really big one so we got not only a lot of interest from people who are saying why don't you have a yiddish course i would like to learn yiddish on dual and go but also people saying i want to help duolingo create a yiddish course how can i get involved and and i think just because of that we started the yiddish course this was many years ago there have been many different people involved um and it's kind of taken a long time because you know people who are leaders in the community then get busy with other projects and go off and do other things but we've been really lucky here to have this team that's here today that's done the final push over the last kind of two years um and and made most of the content and all the decisions that kind of led to the reality of the course so um that's the that's the history yeah that's great so let's start with actually the team itself livvy i imagine you growing up in a facility home there wasn't much mention of duolingo so how did you find out about it and what made you decide to help put together the yiddish course um basically i went to public school for high school and we had spanish courses in our school in new york you have to take a foreign language so my school only offered spanish which is why i take spanish and in order to basically get ahead in the class i was looking for apps on like my ipod touch for spanish like courses basically or spanish um where to learn spanish spanish dictionaries and things like that and then i found duolingo and i started using it and that's how i came to use duolingo basically just to like improve my spanish yeah so what took you from spanish to yiddish you obviously do yiddish fluently yeah so i saw that there was an incubator and in the incubator they have basically like the languages that they're making that are in progress and i thought that they have the edition hebrew and then after like i applied of course i wanted to be on the team because i like duolingo and i wanted to help other people learn languages so basically i applied and i didn't really hear an answer back because they were still working on it but then after a few years the hebrew course got released and like there was no progress in together so i applied again and i still didn't get a response and then like maybe two years later my brother got um an email saying that maybe he if he wants to join the team and he said yeah so then he joined the team and then after he joined the team he asked if he could invite me because um we would work together like very well and they said yeah you can invite whoever you think is fit for the course so he of course invited me and that's how i came onto the course yeah okay so for those of you who may not know this yiddish has many dialects there is for example lithuanian yiddish called litvishedish there is the southern yiddish spoke that was spoken in ukraine romania that's which means southern yiddish and then you have polished polish yiddish but mostly see them today speak hungarian yiddish and so there had to be a decision made about choosing a dialect to teach it in as well as deciding what to do about teaching grammar since there are no schools or courses in yiddish grammar in the hasidic community but only in the outside of the qasida community so amina if you can explain what that was like trying to bring these two worlds together to create a yiddish course uh sure um so uh livvy and suruly actually made the decision about grammar and spelling before i even joined the course um i from what i understand they actually maybe levy wants to tell that that part and then i can i can talk about the uh the pronunciation sure so um yeah so basically when i started doing sentences for the course it was just my brother and i basically writing all the sentences and adding words and all that and then um the kit said uh there was a little bit of confusion on our side because we knew that like you said get morgen and giten tug so the gender changes but we weren't sure why or like what made it change and it was too confusing for us because everything becomes the like just the and then um in yiddish we have four different articles d feminine dia masculine dust neutral and dem is used for this object so you can imagine what life is talking about how confusing this must be for hasidim who just say da the way we have the in english yeah so for like very few words we would use the gender but very very few and we didn't really know the rhyme or reason for this and in order to make a course that had a good structure we needed someone else that was um well like well versed in the edition had the the cleveland i don't know how you say it but basically that had the yeah the rules in the language basically well yeah sorry yeah right so so so uh livvy and suruly had had made the decision that you know their their upbringing didn't provide them with um you know any formalized spelling and grammar for yiddish and so they decided to adopt the um sort of standard spelling and grammar that's used um that's taught in universities and so forth um and so that's when i came on board to help them um to to help them figure out how to learn and then and then teach um all these uh gender grammatical gender and case and all of that and the court the development of the course went along for probably nine months just just putting in sentences that's that's the bulk of the work initially um but as we got closer to you give us an example of some of those sentences that you created uh sure i mean there are i think um there are thousands of sentences in the course uh but the sentence could be like uh ichaboy i also have three cats or uh my guitar is green my guitar is green and i just to clarify i'm not saying i'm not pronouncing these sentences in yiddish with the dialect that's spoken on duolingo so it might sound a little different for those of you who might have been learning um or uh ich es spiegel a tafiristic i eat sunnyside eggs for breakfast um all kinds of sentences uh you know day-to-day sentences and and there are also some somewhat sillier sentences in there too like uh uh espanish normal i'm not normal or uh vervoint in us who lives in a pineapple under the sea which is a reference to a children's television program for those who don't know so um you know between uh mostly serious relevant sentences and some silly sentences and and you know mostly the sentences what sentences we could teach were limited by what words we had taught to date um you know sometimes it's hard to to build sentences when you only have a vocabulary of 10 15 words um so the intro lessons talk a lot about pyramid pyramids and madrid madrid and babka and and so forth some basic vocabulary so anyway after a certain point um we realized that we needed to get started on recording the audio um but uh that was that was a very hard decision um we had members as you mentioned russell there are several dialects of yiddish that are spoken nowadays and everybody has a very strong emotional attachment to the dialect they grew up in or that their grandparents spoke um and as well even among the team we had uh team members who spoke um litvish northern yiddish uh team members who spoke um you know hungarian satmyrish and and uh i speak uh southeastern uh ukrainian romanian yiddish so we represented you know a very interesting cross-section of the yiddish world as well so the process that we went through we we decided we tried to pick just among our team we tried to have the discussion and conversation and come to a consensus and um we couldn't really come to a consensus just among ourselves and we also felt it wasn't right for us to make the decision for everybody what dialect should be used and so we made the uh the key decision to publish a survey an open um google form where anyone who wanted to we we did request that the people who answer the survey be people who would who would use the duolingo yiddish course though of course we had no control over that um we did limit it to one vote per person but we essentially laid out you know here's the three different dialects here are some arguments for each dialect and and vote and so some examples the arguments would be um northern yiddish um or really how we would have taught it would be um the standardized evo yiddish which is not exactly northern yiddish but similar enough um one thing that has it has going for it is that it's the yiddish taught in most university programs so duolingo would be able to you know seamlessly integrate as a tool into those courses um and also the spelling and pronunciation are a little bit they correlate a little bit better so there's a little bit more one-to-one correspondence between the vowels especially as they're spoken and written which makes it easier for language learners um central yiddish which you know has polish yiddish hungarian yiddish as kind of a broad category the arguments for those were first of all um you know it's most likely you know there's no good surveys of yiddish speakers but most likely if you had to go around and count how which dialects had the most speakers probably the central hungarian galaxy yiddish would have the most number of native speakers especially since the hasidic the hasidic families have between nine and thirteen kids you've got a lot of british-speaking kids running around right and not you know not not all hasidic sects speak this dialect of yiddish but but a good number of them do and also um there are very few places in the world where you can actually um where yiddish is actually the vernacular where you can you're taught yetis in schools you go shopping and yiddish at home and most of those communities as well speak this central yiddish and then the argument for south southern southeastern yiddish would have been um that it's somewhat of a compromise dialect from a vowel shift perspective it's halfway between one could say northern yiddish and central yiddish and it also um used to be the standard yiddish of the theater and often film um and so it was also a historical standard so to make a long story short we put out the survey um near of the three options we got i don't remember how many responses but it was in in the thousands maybe 6 000 responses wow and um out of those nearly 50 percent voted for the khasidis dialect and so um between that and the fact that the people who had done the bulk of the work on the course for hasidis um and the fact that it is the most widely spoken vernacular form of yiddish we decided to go with that one so the compromise was the dialect would be acidic but it would maintain the grammar that's taught in yiddish language classes all over the world correct and actually people um it is possible to do the entire course with the audio turned off um so if somebody really does not want to learn the hasidis dialect and let's for example just want to learn to read yiddish they could just turn off the audio and then it would be almost as if taking a university style course in yiddish right so libby i wanted to ask you uh as the woman who does the voice uh voice-overs um what is it about being a woman that lends itself to using your lines the sentences did you get specifically mother sentences or wife sentences or did you have texts that you read that could have been read by man or a woman good question so i i think it would have made sense if i did the female sentences but when i started there was still a lot of missing audio and the comment the consensus was that first record and later we could re-require just to get that audio in so i did a little bit of both i introduced myself as yossi and velvil or various names um in other words you could be you see a little boy called yussi because obviously guess he is a man wouldn't have a voice like yours yeah yeah so most of the sentences have uh a male and a female recording the same thing oh i see so yeah but at some point i was told to just record because you know in the beginning it was more important to not have missing audio and it's still a work in progress so some things are being re-recorded even i go back and record my own um sentences okay so i understand you also needed to choose a flag uh to represent the language which is easy when you have a language that has its own country uh but what do you do with yiddish it has no country um so i'd like to open this up for those of you who know i guess mina was more involved with this what logo did you choose and how did you decide this i i think probably it went through a lot of the same process that i mentioned with the dialect first the team tried to settle on our own uh flag and in fact previous iterations of the yiddish teams that didn't involve any of us had proposed several flags for a while it was assumed that the the menorah flag which is a white flag with a black um stripe on top and bottom and a black nora in the middle that that would be the yiddish flag that's how if you search yiddish flag on google that's what comes up but that's not really ever been used by any sort of community or or really popularly used and the the team before us also thought that it would be nice to use the metaphor of the golden peacock which is used in yiddish literature um as as a symbol for the flag um but uh the the the graphics were a little hard to nail down how to make it look like a duolingo compliant consistent you know icon but still look like like a peacock um so the the team batted around some ideas between us um and then again we opened it up for comment from the audience uh from everybody um anyone who wanted to could submit a design for the flag we got a lot of different suggestions some some took the flag concept seriously and suggested a combination of the german flag or the russian flag or the polish flag or the israeli flag you know literally a flag um others really took to heart what we described that it's not really a flag it's just icon in the app let's let's remove the nationalism out of this and just call it an icon and we got all kinds of suggestions foods you know bagel chocolate spices yeah uh some people said you should put oi on there um uh we got a lot of we got a lot of suggestions for the golden peacock or the white goat or a few other you know animals that are associated with um with yiddish um we got some more generically jewish suggestions like a menorah um like a a jewish star various things like a mug and david um and then finally the last group of suggestions i think that we got were some combinations of yiddish letters an aleph a yud the word yiddish things like that um and um in the end we went with a comet's alif which is an aleph with a kind of it looks like a little t a short t underneath it and it makes it um yiddish uses a modified version of the hebrew alphabet so hebrew has every letter is a consonant and then the vowels are communicated by various dots and lines around the letters yiddish is different in that the alphabet has both consonants and vowels like english does and so it had to borrow some of the hebrew letters but modify them to make them be able to express all the vowels that are used in yiddish so this comet's alif which in northern and southeastern yiddish is called o and in central yiddish usually pronounced is is not for example the word fun which means flag in standard yiddish it would be uh fun i know that actually that's an example that fun yeah it doesn't know what that's become right yeah in northern yiddish it's fun and in central and southeastern yiddish it's fun um and so um uh that that that is an example of a letter that is uh intrinsically yiddish you know we didn't want a flag that would just be generically jewish because you know hebrews already uh on duolingo we would hope that someday ladino or some other jewish languages might make it onto the onto duolingo so we wanted something that was specifically yiddish but also universally yiddish you know not something that just represented a small group of yiddish speakers so i think it's not just not just technically but even culturally commits aleph could represent yiddish because in the song which is a song about a rabbi teaching the little children the olive base and what's the letter they bring out comet if he's saying to the kids everybody i want you to say come it's aleph how do you pronounce it oh comet's olive oh so that is in our minds we all know oi from flipperchick so we just associate commits olive with that song and i so i think it's not just technically that comet salaf is the only one of the jewish languages that you could find that but also culturally it fits absolutely and i think we definitely considered that imagery as well especially since um pripycic is one of the very few yiddish songs that is known across the yiddish world it is still sung among some hasidic communities um i have heard recordings from the hasidic community and in the in the just the general ashkenazi jewish world it's also known because it was used as the soundtrack for spielberg's schindler's list so even if you don't know the words you know the tune is just you know you hear it and everybody those of you who don't don't know which song we're talking about it goes like this [Music] has [Music] and and that imagery was also just appropriate for of course teaching people yiddish because it the entire imagery is of a teacher teaching people to read the alphabet and speak yiddish so now that the hasidic dialect was the one that was chosen i want to ask livey and libby do you think that this will be something that haseetam would be interested in hearing that oh they took our dialect or do you feel that they will say oh it's still theirs it's it's something from the secular world i'm curious to hear has there been feedback uh from from your family or from people that you know in the hasida community should i start oh sure um i've had many people come up to me and tell me that um they've tried it and they realize that they don't really know yiddish grammar as well as they thought they did but i wouldn't say like they don't really know the grammar it's more like they don't know yevo grammar but um and they're very happy to be able to hear their dialect finally being spoken in a professional setting because usually it's only spoken at home or in the street or um so on and so forth but it's never really used in um like a setting where it's taught or um any like professional setting really so it's very exciting for them and it's very new and also they're excited to like finally feel a part of the yiddish culture that's not um that is secular basically instead of only like religiously or or like our home if that makes sense yeah so of those people that you spoke to how many of you have them actually signed up um at least like four people have like done a big chunk of the course when they've told me that yeah so libby what do you what have you heard so i i would say the type of hacienda that are already already have a smartphone already have the ability to download apps like duolingo i've got to be a little bit more chilled out so to speak and a little more open-minded so they're generally okay i mean they're they're using other apps on their phones so duolingo is harmless and so there are maybe some progressive sentences along the course such as oh i have two mothers but yeah i don't again if they're reaching that point they don't care um those who would have a problem with it wouldn't probably barely know how to text on a phone they probably have flip phones flip phones so yeah overall i received whatever feedback i did receive was also positive like oh that's so cool i think they feel a little bit proud um like oh our language is getting recognized uh that's so cool we matter we count it's it's it's literally validated yeah and even i sometimes people always ask me about my accent and and of course they don't believe me that i could that i was born and bred in new york where are you from where are you really from but where are your parents from and then when i tell them oh i speak kiddish many people still raise eyebrows and they say what what is that finnish they start guessing other languages so people don't even know that yiddish is a language so yeah i it's it's been largely positive i mean maybe some technical critique but yeah yeah i'm looking at the chat box somebody said uh joanne yaffi said i chuckled a bit about that sentence i have two mothers but it goes to show the yiddish is a living language so that means that you know that's validating what you did to create a program that really reflects our culture today and i do know a yiddish-speaking child who has two mothers so so do i so uh and how do we also reflect the traditional life so we you know that's an example of modern life so what do you how much of the sentences do relate to religious traditions um and and other things that are a part of an orthodox lifestyle or any religious lifestyle so i would say about the first 50 of the course is is maybe religion neutral for the most part um you know uh it's it's somewhat more generic sentences that one might see in any course about cats and computers and guitars and and food and so forth um and then once you once you've uh made a little bit of effort and showed that you're you know you're you're you're you're actually dedicated to this course we start introducing a little bit of the jewish content and so we have skills called shabbos uh pesa or paisa shabas uh circus so the all the jewish holidays and chavez and weddings um and so forth and and um terminology associated with those um with those uh times of year um because uh really you can't learn yiddish without knowing to talk about shabbos or or the or the yanto event the holidays um and then finally if you if you've made it all the way to the end there's a special treat there are two skills at the end one is called hasidis that has words that are specific to the to the satmar khasidish experience rebe gartel beckisha as well as well as certain vocabulary that the hasidim use that um non-khasiblin don't use often from words that are borrowed from hungarian that non-hungarian dialects wouldn't use um and the course includes those hungarian words that are used in yiddish yes several of those in the hasidis skill at the end and then there's also a litvish skill at the end which has litvish audio so you can hear how that dialect differs as well as some words that are spelled using the the spelling convention that lit you jews tend to use and um again words that they use that are specific to their dialect usually borrowed from russian uh maybe levy can live he can give a little bit more uh examples of the hasidis uh skill sure so in the casino we basically as mina said um we taught vocabulary that is like that has to do with um hasidim like we we taught the word who and kasidhis and satmir and a few more words that have to do with facili and then we also taught words that only we use for ex or and um okay so for example that means to walk so we thought or which means to watch and then we taught um like baba which means grandmother for us most people say baba or bhuba i'm not sure um but in my time like we say baba so we taught that and then um we taught a few more vocabulary that only we use but we also taught a pronoun that only hasidim used really um nowadays and and it's not taught it's not sorry it's not a yevo it's not in um ukrainian there's just not on all of these dialects it's mostly only in our dialect um the pronoun is called and inc so s is the nominative and inc is the date of an accusative for you it's the pronoun so the plural it's the plural um you and it's informal so eid would be used um for formal u and plural formal u basically and we rarely use that in our dialogue we mostly use d which is do in vivo and um ets and ink that's what we mostly use so that's taught in the khasider school that's interesting to me so when you're speaking to an elderly jew yeah you would say d you wouldn't say it depends like let's say if it's rabbi then you would say like buzzfeed that's right in the third person right and i've even seen people like to uh an older female they would say like z like buzzfeel z instead of eid i've seen that personally but i'm not sure personally i've never used eid except for like maybe once in my life um even to my um teachers we would only use bitteb or or anything like that we we would rarely use eid i've seen it in books and in articles and another such cases but i personally have never used it really and i've never really like met people that use it often it's just not something we use we would use etson inc or um yeah interesting olivia i would want to know if in because she grew up in williamsburg and i grew up in broad park and i know that in barrow park we we use more english sometimes and also um um our yiddish is a bit different than williams work women's work is a bit more fit him which is like um religious and they use other vocabularies i'm just curious like if in williamsburg they use eid more often than in baroque yeah i was about to add so first of all you guys are modern everyone always knew that bar parkers are so modern they speak english i mean yeah that's to start off and yes we did use eid more often but especially when speaking to somebody of the opposite gender it's it's more dedicated than just to keep that distance the e automatically you know it's harder to flirt if you're if you're used to saying eid instead of directly d but also it was drilled into us about dedicated to the elders to or to to always means respect to show respect to the elders yeah yeah to honor the the yeah people that are older than you and teachers and principals and just random strangers so in in williamsburg it was definitely more of a thing there were always those that just said d but they're usually right away corrected by somebody like hey you know speak more respectfully interesting so there's a difference in in borrow park and in williamsburg concerning the uh formal you yeah and also in general i didn't speak any english until until i was in first grade and we had an english class i remember telling all my aunts i'm i'm shimmering i'm shivering well shivering so we had somewhere a shiver of shiver which means i'm so nervous because i don't speak any english and how am i going to manage so in bar park in many homes the mothers speak english to their children at least to their daughters so that's that's a very big difference because i mean the accent will be a little bit different and of course it will be easier to learn it took me years until i became fully comfortable speaking english wow yeah uh i'm also uh looking now at the check box uh some people are saying was it a wise choice for um the hasidic um pronunciation to be used it's making it hard for me there are people here who have actually signed up for the course uh expecting it to be in standard yiddish and then they get kind of stuck because they're kind of confused by the dialect um so i think one of you had said that you do have the option uh of just doing the um the visual rather than the audio obviously that's an answer uh does anybody have another uh either suggestion or a way to uh you know let them know what they can do about this my my approach is if we found a compromise that everybody has something to complain about we've done it right and we have gotten flack from both sides so there are some people complaining about the fact that we use the hasidis dialect and from the other side we have people complaining that that um that we use the evo spelling or that we chose to teach the word talk or mobile instead of cell phone or or um on koivegala instead of shopping cart or whatever you know we we we did we didn't we we we um we're all jews so i can't say we tried to please everybody but we did we made something so everybody should have something to complain yeah somebody just said typical two jews five opinions uh and somebody else asks is the vocabulary the same uh in standard yiddish and in hasidic yiddish which one of you would like to respond to that sure i don't mind um basically not all the vocabulary is the same for example the word onion we say civil but um for yivo that's deich minish which means that it's basically taken from german and they use the word sibila so in order to make sure that people would know both we actually made a skill as the last skill called synonyms where we taught um vocabulary used in different dialects that are not as common so basically when we added a word we try to find common ground between all dialects a word that we would all recognize at least maybe you don't use it every day but if you recognize it then that's good but if let's say um there was a word that that one wouldn't recognize in one dialect but yes and the other and then like like let's say um i don't know okay let's say it's viewable right so we we taught the word civility just because it's more common in in lit fish and in um southeastern yiddish i think right but we don't use that in hasida shiites we use sweebo so we did teach the word feeble in the synonyms skill and let's say the word mima or ant um also tanta so in our dialect we don't really use tanta i've never really encountered that word before um unless like i think about europeans or i don't know that's just what it is to me but um [Music] we use mima all the time that's our standard word for it so we used meema because in evo people understand the word meme maybe they don't use it but they understand it and then we can standard yet would have been moment so you have me but the spelling is still the same that's what i'm doing so so people would recognize mima or mumma and tanta and evo but for us it's more people would understand more mima than tanta um of course it depends on each family maybe like they prefer different words but i'm talking about in general um so what we did is we taught the word meme as the main word for ant and then in the synonym skill we taught the word tanta as a different way to say the word ant so do you have a glostery in the front or in the back that includes both when you say ant it gives you both options all three options so basically yes there is um there's called the best translation or bt where it's the word uh it's a sentence that everybody sees when they're doing duolingo like the sentences that come up on the app and then there is called an 80 or alternate translation where we basically write in all the alternate ways to say the same sentence or maybe there's a different word or like let's say you say you have to translate the word you are eating you could say ds or eat est right so the main one that you would see on the app is probably ds for most of the sentences so in order to accept that um there also might be a person that would write eat s instead of ds we would have to accept it as an alternate translation so we would also we would have to accept ests which is the one so we accepted all the different um ways to say it in the alternate translations it's only in the back end of the duolingo basically people won't see it unless they type it in and then it just accepts it it doesn't it's not teaching it it's just accepting it if you write it like that right and and duolingo as a system doesn't really have a glossary or a dictionary built into the course it really relies on more natural learning so if you see the word it starts coming up in your mind if you hover over a word in the question it will give you a hint so it'll suggest you know some options but they're not always the right option because you know uh not every word in english is translated into yiddish the same way in every single sentence um but uh you know that that's there um but but as live he said we we tried to keep it at least simple for language learners in the beginning so we picked one word and that's the one that the language learners will see but if somebody who already knows another yiddish word either they speak itish or or they or they know a word from their grandparents or from a class and they type that word in ideally it should be accepted it shouldn't be marked wrong that said there are dozens of ways potentially of saying every sentence and we're doing our best to add all of them um so i will i will address the audience here anybody who's doing the duolingo course and you type in a sentence that you think is correct um but then the app tells you it's incorrect that may just be because we have to manually type in every alternative on the back end so there's a little button that looks like a flag or it says report and if you report it then we could take a look on the back end and we could say oh you know that's right you could also say it like that and then we'll add it and then future learners will be able to have that answer accepted so for those of us who have never tried duolingo how does it work technically let's say i wake up in the morning i want to get my lesson for the day uh do i go to my app and immediately the next one it's like it had stopped from the chapter that we did recently and then we starts from there anyone who can answer that just how the technically how does it work when you take that you know when i take a textbook i open up i know i'm on page 63 i go to page 63 and i continue how does it work myra maybe you can answer that yeah i'm happy to take that one um so duolingo has a structure we call it a tree but it's it's basically the course design that you would see when you open up the duolingo app and you open up the yiddish course and there are some modular thematic units called skills that kind of start um with the very basics and then they build upon each other and they get progressively more difficult and more sophisticated now if you already have some background you can take a test in the beginning and then have yourself placed into the course at the level that the system essentially thinks you should be so we do a best guess based on your answers to a test um and then we have a lot of fancy stuff happening in the background that essentially tries to create a personalized tutor experience for you so all of the content that the team has created and put into the structure of the course is then kind of served up to the learner in the order that we think will work the best for that particular learner so it is very individualized very personalized the system will remember what you've done the previous day you can have settings to get a reminder every day to do five minutes or ten minutes you can kind of give yourself little nudges you can follow friends on duolingo and kind of um support each other so if you see that someone else has just passed you um in the yiddish course you can say hey i'm gonna get you um and and they're kind of fun little gamification features like that but um i think the key takeaway is that it's it's all about personalization so there's all this content and then there's a lot of thinking that goes into making that um tailored to the needs of that specific learner does that make sense sure sure and then you can go as slow or as fast as you want exactly you can repeat um content you can do a practice session you can also go more in depth in certain skills there are levels we call it strengthening so as you kind of level up your skill uh strength bar will get closer to full and eventually become gilded so you can either decide that you want all of your skills to be very strong and kind of go gradually but deep or you can do most of the content at a very superficial level and then go back and strengthen um whatever you want to later so it's you have a lot of choice and a lot of power over your experience yeah well carol jacobs asks is it transliterated or written with hebrew letters mina i'll let you take that one yeah it's written using um the modified hebrew alphabet that yiddish uses and the system of spelling is is mostly according to the yivo system of yiddish spelling with some minor edits i was just thinking when we were talking before about uh different words from different communities uh one very popular word um in the hasita community which has just come into this nanakucity community is the word for thank you until now all students were taught the way to say thank you and yiddish is adank if you want to say thank you very much it's a shaynam duncan and suddenly we start hearing you go into williamsburg you say a dunk people just stare at you because there the way to say thank you is shkaya comes from yeshikoya which usually means job well done good job let's say if you just got an aliyah in shul and you come off the bema people will say to you and to hear it then also meaning thank you was really a cultural awakening of sorts because we never stopped to think that thank you could be said any other way so in so in a way this course is really teaching us diversity how to not only say words differently but actually think of language differently and address that i i wanted to add to that actually i saw somebody in the chat um had commented that um they listened to the hasidishi dish but say it out loud and litvished to pronounce it but actually the yiddish they heard as a child was a mishmash of various dialects and and um you know to our conversation before i just wanted to add that you know linguistically the dialects can be generally categorized as northern central southern but within every dialect are sub-dialects and sub-sub-dialects and you know you could have um families where father spoke one dialect and mother's book one dialect and the children now speak a mixed dialect and so i really like to think that everybody actually has their own idiolect both with respect to pronunciation and with respect to vocabulary selection and in fact we've gotten some feedback on some of the audio that you know some of the voices each word you can hear both male and female audio from it and sometimes they don't sound exactly the same even though all the people recording the audio grew up in the satmer community because you know as levi and livy and libby said the different communities their yiddish has diverged a little bit as well um and and every person just speaks a little differently um so exactly some people may have picked up some baby may not have picked up that's just the way it is one thing that just occurred to me i imagine that a number of people taking the course are not jewish may not know what shabbos and sikkis and schwiess is so how much is explained when you're presenting a scene at a shabbos table i can open that up to anybody duolingo doesn't really have the option to present context i was just gonna say we wish we did that's something i think that's missing right is um there are certain things that you just can't replace um and and speaking with someone or being in a cultural setting um and actually celebrating together and having that experience is not something that we've tried to reproduce on duolingo we do have you know some some designs and some illustrations and we are working on new what we call challenge types kind of exercise designs that would allow us to have more of that kind of cultural context um but right now it's all very very much text-based it's just kind of it's plugged into the duolingo app the way that it works for all other languages um so it's the emphasis is really on scaling which i think is why we don't have a lot of flexibility right now for the the cultural complexities and context that of course language learning would would necessitate to do really well i'll add to what myra said that you know it's true that many of the languages don't have a ton of cultural context because of this setup but as i mentioned before we had decided that you know the yiddish team that we can't strip yiddish's cultural context we have to teach about all these holidays so what we did do is we made sure that the translitera the translation of each word um you know if there was an english equivalent that seemed reasonable we used it so shabbos we went back and forth i think it's often translated as saturday because it can be used this saturday you know and i'm going swimming on saturday as opposed to you know shabbos i go to shul it might be translated as shabbos um but the words that um that we that we the translations that we chose were ones that if you google you will get to the wikipedia page explaining what they are so like the translation of sukis is uh i don't remember if it's it's probably sukis but if you google sukis it'll explain to you so it nowadays it's pretty easy for somebody to stick something in google if they want to really understand that's true look it up so uh as we come to the close of this really fascinating discussion i just wanted to open up to you what do you see as the the future of yiddish and duolingo what would you like to see and what challenges do you think that you may anticipate i think the team is probably also best positioned to answer this for um general context i'll just say that duolingo's courses are always evolving and we're always taking learner feedback into account one of the nice things about being available to everyone around the world is that we have really big numbers of learners and so that's very powerful when you're getting feedback from lots of people you can really use that to make the course much much better and kind of figure out what content is working well what content needs to be adjusted so we're going to spend a lot of the next couple of months just really analyzing the kinds of feedback we're getting improving the content that exists and then i i hope expanding the course in in what ways i i i would leave it uh to the course authors to maybe give us a sneak peek of what you guys are thinking or what you would add if you if you had unless you're unless you're just so exhausted leaning back saying i did mine and now let it just go on its own is that how you feel it was a lot of work it's a lot of work yeah um and and i think it's it's kind of up to everybody um to decide how long and how much they want to put in but mina um how how are you feeling i feel like you you kind of led the charge and are are still kind of thinking about the future of the course well i i actually would say that um you know i i did maybe some of the higher level things but i would i would uh say that that livvy really led the charge um in terms of developing the course content and really bringing this course to fruition so you know for for me at the moment where i'm thinking about various ways that we can um improve to you know make the course more open more um uh i wouldn't say acceptable but inclusive of all the various types of dialects and translations and words you know as far as possible but maybe levy has some bigger picture ideas i mean i agree with what you're saying but i would also like to add um just in general more more skills because i feel like um we could teach way more things that we skipped out on um i feel like we could teach a bit more about like day-to-day life because we didn't teach that i mean we did but at the same time there are so many things we can teach about like let's say the computer we didn't really teach any vocabulary for the computer and it's in 2021 everybody has a computer almost and i think it's important to know the vocabulary for a computer so like for example we use the english words for everything we say mouse we say keyboard we say screen in hashida but i'm sure there are yiddish words that exist so for people like me who are doing the course as well like even though i'm one of the creators i'm still doing it you know what i mean i'm still learning vocabulary while i'm doing it um also the genders of words like i need the reinforcement by doing the course so if i make um a skill for let's say the computer then we wouldn't be using the english vocabulary so i would try to find more um skills like that like i would try to make more skills like that that would include things that are more relevant to today's day yeah libby do you want to add what you think for the future yeah so what i would love to add in terms of skills are is more um idioms expressions there's so much humor in yiddish so much of the language what i love about is the humor so i would add more of that and maybe more of the more odd words that aren't like these funny words um that we use and expressions uh then some people asked about stories i wouldn't mind adding stories but i guess that's after the most important work is done i think stories could be nice and then my own personal ideas that duolingo generally doesn't do but i'm just throwing it out there is maybe throwing in some songs or some little chants or things related to the culture so people feel more connected other than just you know learning how you know learning about cats and things that are more generic across across the board um compared to other duolingo courses offered and by the way i do want to give a shout out to livy and those who made the sentences that they they did um they were pretty creative and i shocked to myself they did they did a very good job but i would add even more if time allows it just just dedicated to humor jokes um and cultural things yeah and i think one of the one of the features um that duolingo has stories is what we're referring to but just to explain a little bit for those who may not know what that is um it's a different type of lesson experience within duolingo where you have more context and you could imagine actually using that i love the idea of songs having um teaching a song in the format of a story and having more context than just one sentence and illustrations and fill in the blanks and kind of like a whole coherent narrative um so that's definitely something we're exploring we're already doing it for a couple other languages and we're gonna try to scale that to more languages so hopefully coming soon for yiddish too right so uh several people already commented on my own yiddish word of the day which is another way that can complement your duolingo yiddish learning uh every day we have this we post to youtube uh on a certain theme it could be liking and loving it could be the color red it could be fasting and i teach you know it's just a three-set three-minute clip where i teach the vocabulary and proverbs and it has the humor that libby was talking about i also want to give a shout out to mina who does a digital yiddish crossword puzzle for us uh we already have um you know two dozen of them up on our website um forward dot com slash yiddish and for those of you who love uh uh crossword puzzles the best part of this because it's digital you can always peek and get the real answers if you want to uh which makes it so much more fun because you feel like more uh you can master it more easily so i do encourage um those of you who have gotten to a certain level uh to try out mina's crossword puzzles in yiddish i want to thank the team this has been wonderful i want to thank you also from the bottom of my heart what you have done for leadership duolingo i think this is so exciting hearing so many people signing up for it is really a shot in the arm for those of us who work for yiddish and are raising our children and grandchildren and yiddish so we don't feel so alone it's wonderful to see a bridge being brought between the aceta community and outside the hasidic community with our mutual love of yiddish um so thank you very much and as we say in yiddish zeitgeist and thank you i just left the link to the um sign up on duolingo in the chat oh anyone who wants to start the course you just need to do a lingo account it's free it's easy to sign up um let us know what you think we're excited to hear back from you wonderful thank you

Channel: Forward

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Id: hYLVqfiLDpM

Length: 55min 42sec (3342 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021