#side note just found an interview with a yiddish activist based in brazil :O

[atthebell]

chipping in with my own german speaker experience: from listening, yiddish is pretty difficult for me to understand. i'm sure part of it is just not being used to it - I think if I heard it more often I would get better at picking things out and recognising them? but for now where I've barely had contact with the language, when I hear someone speaking yiddish my mind mostly just latches onto the few words I do recognise, and then builds together sentence fragments from that + context clues; but also sometimes an entire sentence will be intelligible at once. it really varies, I think just depending on which words are being used and whether those happen to come from german (and/or still be pronounced like german) or not.

as for reading: difficult but doable! but also interestingly, I'm looking at an example right now and the way I'm pronouncing this in my head is a) pretty sure not how yiddish is meant to be pronounced, but b) does sound very much like bavarian/austrian dialects - which I don't actively speak myself, but do hear spoken a lot irl. I've read text in transliterated franconian (northern bavarian) dialect before and this is a similar experience to that for me - read along, be a little confused, try to pronounce the words to myself, and go "ahh that's what that is" because conversely I find said dialects easier to understand when listening than when I see them written down (though again that's just from levels of experience - if I only ever hear a dialect and don't see it written down then of course hearing it out loud makes it more parse-able to me)

nods nods that's interesting!!!! i think as well a lot of it is a difference in usage these days-- most of yiddish does come from german, but words used in yiddish will be extremely antiquated german, so modern german speakers won't have any idea what they're supposed to be, or letters will have shifted (take "foygl", for an example of both, which i believe is "Vogel" in modern german and no longer even means bird)

and there's a lot of really significant words that are in hebrew or aramaic rather than coming from german-- words for religious concepts/objects, cultural terms, etc. plus all the borrowing from polish and russian, plus some very very old french thrown into the mix. yiddish is made up of so many different elements that it makes it less cognate to german for sure

i would also say again that in transliteration yiddish is very different to german-- the spelling is far more parsable if you're thinking of english orthography, although it depends on your accent. litvish (lithuanian) yiddish, the kind most nonnative speakers use and the kind taught in more academic circles (litvish is also spoken by lubavitchers), is very different to poylish (polish) yiddish, the kind spoken by most native speakers (hasidim) (and there's many other dialects, these are just the most common today and many others have been lost/severely decimated following immigration language loss + the holocaust). when i learned yiddish we had to pick up on the distinctions, although most academic speakers are not going to speak to hasidim very often if at all. poylish yiddish has very different vowel sounds, and i think would be much harder to understand for most german speakers (especially with how much more hebrew hasidim use in conversation), whereas lithuanian yiddish remains a little closer to german, and western dialects would be even easier (but there are no western yiddish speakers left today, at least not to my knowledge).

yiddish book center with their wexler oral history project has a ton of interviews of yiddish speakers on youtube if you or any other german speakers wanted to have a listen and see how different accents sound to you!