Languages and Linguistics

Unlike the other German dialects, Yiddish uses a completely different alphabet. Furthermore, Yiddish diverged from German several hundred years ago, when it was actually a dialect of Middle German. There are different versions of Yiddish, dialects, I suppose, but the Orthodox version, standard, is very similar to German in many ways, but it does have some grammatical differences and some very different vocabulary. However, if you understand German, Yiddish won't be too terribly difficult to understand in spoken form.