Not sufficiently comprehensive
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Unlike some reviewers, I specifically wanted a transliteration dictionary,as I primarily want to be able to understand spoken Yiddish.
And thisbook just isn't comprehensive enough. In addition, it uses a non-standardtransliteration scheme, making it incompatible with the most popularYiddish tuition books.
OK, it's cheap and readily available in the UK.But I felt let down and ended up buying a more expensive work, becausethis one doesn't come up to scratch.
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Great for calling people something that they dont understand
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this book is very good.it has a good introduction on how you say things and about yiddish and a dictionary with slangs and phrases like "you eat like a horse" and "get lost". some of them are really funny and it has over 4,000 words as it says on the book. You will have fun pronouncing them!
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good price
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It's packed with phrases and expressions, slang too! It's complete both ways, romanized also, so if you don't really know the Hebrew alphabet, this is the book for you.
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Nice Yiddish Dictionary
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I think that giving this book four stars was fairly generous of me. This book has it's advantages and disadvantages as any dictionary does. The thing that I liked about it was that you get alot considering what you pay for it. It has many of the most common words, and even if it doesn't have a word you are looking for, it has enough words that it probably has a similar word to what you are looking for. I think it is a very good buy. Now to the disadvantages. A similar word isn't always close enough for all of us. I know it usually isn't good enough for me. The other really huge disadvantage is that it is romanized. If you are a beginner in learning Yiddish, you might not know what romanization is. Romanization is also known as transliteration. It is awful. What it means is that it doesn't use anything but English letters. In other words, it doesn't use any Yiddish letters. You're probably wondering "why is this a huge problem?", but just try reading THE YIDDISH FORVERTS newspaper, and you will see what the big problem is. It only makes sense that things written in the Yiddish language use the Yiddish alphabet. If you see something in Yiddish characters, and try to look it up in English characters, you might have a really hard time, and possibly not ever find the word at all, because many Yiddish words come frome the Hebrew language, and Hebrew isn't always written exactly as it sounds. Romanization generally is written fairly near how it sounds. It really just depends what you are looking for, buy I certainly can't say I enjoyed the romanization.
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