> Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it. Yiddish is basically Ge

> Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it. Yiddish is basically German in the same way that Dutch is basically German: it's often possible to directly translate a word with some simple letter substitutions, but the choice of different letters in each language's orthography reflects an underlying difference in pronunciation. E.g. אוי וויי is often transliterated as "oy vey" while the corresponding Standard German pronunciation would be "au weh". If you ignore the usual Hebrew letter values and pretend that it's actually an unorthodox orthography for Standard German (א glottal stop, וי au, וו w, יי eh), I've found written Yiddish quite easy to get used to as a native German speaker, but understanding it spoken aloud is much more difficult.