How well do you know your Yiddish?

FWIW, I got 15/15. This test wasn't that hard. But we heard it spoken by my parents who spoke Yiddish to each other. As kids we learned enough of it on the sly to know when they're talking about us.

I got 9/15 and I have never heard Yiddish spoken, Guessed out of my knowledge in other languages.

When you know a fair amount of German, you can guess really well.

I don't know that my guesses were educated but I sounded a few of them in my head and the answers seemed ... familiar.

Of the 13 I answered, out of 15, I got 13 correct. The two I wouldn't guess at were phrases. The 13 I answered were basically simple phrases that many New Yorkers might understand. However, the subtle nuances were not tested. For example, "nosh" means from my background, to snack a little. That was not the answer given. It seemed more like a test for a blond shiksa, if you know what I mean.

Since I only heard English in my household, Yiddish was just a secret language between my mother and her sister, to keep family secrets from me. Plus, Russian Yiddish is different than Polish Yiddish, since each version was a mixture of Yiddish with either Polish or Russian. There are subtleties, I believe, that reflect that Russian Jews assimilated into a Russian culture more than Polish Jews attempted to assimilate into a Polish culture, in my opinion.

Anyway, any revival of Yiddish, in my opinion, is just wishful thinking, since today many of the Modern Orthodox refer to a yarmulka (skullcap) by its Hebrew word, keepa (hat). Only the Chassidim use Yiddish as their language; they are actually a small minority within the minority that Jews represent.

Plus, all those Russian Jews that came to NYC just speak Russian in the house. And, they like that language? Who knew? Well, Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew.

oy, 14/15. i got...

13/15, with one I should have known and one I never heard before. Still, a maven.

I'm verklempt!

I hit 15/15; Yiddish was spoken by my paternal grandmother almost exclusively.

So? You're a ringer?

Kinda, sorta. Truth is, I didn't pay attention to it much. I suppose this was all learnt by osmosis.

15/15

I thought "osMoses" was the way the tablets came down from Mt. Sinai (joke).

14/15 made me a maven. I missed "Bashert".

I watched "The Story of the Jews with Simon Schama" on pbs last night. I found it not particularly revealing of anything new, but nonetheless quite interesting.

I watched the same thing and came to similar conclusion.

that one i also missed...

Me too. I didn't want to announce it, in case people read all this before submitting to testing..

My other miss is embarrassing. Roberta is going to throttle me when she finds out.

This is the once upon a time common reply by a mother, to her daughter's lament over a broken relationship, "It wasn't bashert." (It wasn't your destiny).

I guess this reflects some sort of fatalism, about the future being pre-programmed by God, by Eastern European Jews?

I was told by one of my college buddies that there were only 2 Yiddish words one needed to know:
Gelt and Schmuck
Everyone knows what gelt is . . .
And, if you don't have it, you're a schmuck.