{"id":1461,"date":"2012-04-22T12:24:11","date_gmt":"2012-04-22T12:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=1461"},"modified":"2012-04-20T19:26:41","modified_gmt":"2012-04-20T19:26:41","slug":"yiddish-in-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/22\/yiddish-in-japan\/","title":{"rendered":"Yiddish in Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yiddish is most associated with Jewish people, particularly the Ashkenazi Jews. It has been translated into many languages, but until now not a non-European one.<\/p>\n<p>One man has changed this through his life\u2019s work. Kazuo Ueda is a Japanese linguist who originally specialised in German before teaching himself Yiddish. He is now Japan\u2019s leading scholar in the language, and several years ago published a Japanese-Yiddish dictionary.<\/p>\n<p>But why did Ueda become so devoted?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>He stumbled upon the Jewish language while reading Franz Kafka, himself a fan of Yiddish theater.<\/p>\n<p>Ueda was immediately smitten with the language that is written in Hebrew letters, but is a hybrid of German, Hebrew, Russian and other languages.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yiddish was full of puzzles for me,&#8221; Ueda says. &#8220;That&#8217;s what I love about it. Reading sentences in those strange letters \u2014 it&#8217;s like deciphering a code.&#8221; (Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2012\/04\/16\/150723840\/for-japanese-linguist-a-long-and-lonely-schlep\">NPR<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Perhaps language learners can take something from this story \u2013 to learn a language well requires a little bit of love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yiddish is most associated with Jewish people, particularly the Ashkenazi Jews. It has been translated into many languages, but until now not a non-European one. One man has changed this through his life\u2019s work. Kazuo Ueda is a Japanese linguist who originally specialised in German before teaching himself Yiddish. He is now Japan\u2019s leading scholar [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[420,200,337],"tags":[5,98,420,1126,25,252,337],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japanese","category-translation","category-yiddish","tag-german","tag-hebrew","tag-japanese","tag-language-love","tag-languages","tag-russian","tag-yiddish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1463,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions\/1463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}