Contains over 1,000 useful sentences and phrases for travel or everyday living abroad: food, shopping, medical aid, courtesy, hotels, travel, and other situations. Gives the English phrase, the foreign equivalent, and a transliteration that can be read right off. Also includes many supplementary lists, signs, and aids. All words are indexed.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
See Michael Chabon:
There's a great review of this book at Michael Chabon's website. You can get to it by googling for "Yiddish phrasebook".
Fun!:
There aren't many places left in the world where Yiddish is the primary language; exactly why there would be a travel-phrase book like this one is a little bit perplexing to me. Of course, it was published decades ago, and apparently hasn't been reprinted since, so used copies are the way to acquire this little gem. It is organised in the typical fashion on any travel phrase book - basic expressions; greetings and general social conversation; travel expressions concerning hotels, boats, airlines, etc.;... more info
Hebrew alphabet:
Most Yiddish books only use transliteration. This is difficult because everyone has a different way of doing that. I think it is always better to learn the alphabet. Unfortunately I do not live in the right part of the world to use most of the phrases in this book.
An inexpensive disappointment:
This book is great if you want to say something in Yiddish. It has the English word or phrase, the Yiddish alphabet spelling, and then the phonetic pronunciation. BUT - you can't look up the Yiddish word and get a translation back to English. I have friends who are always throwing some Yiddish phrase at me, I want to know what they are saying! This book doesn't help me with that.
