דער לייענער — “The Reader”
Der Leyner is a contributor-supported project for learning to read Yiddish, sentence by sentence, through classic works of Yiddish literature. You read the original text one sentence at a time, write your own translation, and receive immediate, tutor-style feedback so you can improve as you go.
Each sentence appears in Yiddish. You type what you think it means, and an AI tutor compares your translation against the passage — taking the surrounding sentences into account for context — then points out what you got right and where to look again. Right-click any word for a dictionary definition, and save words to your own vocabulary list as you build it.
The first work offered is Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s Sippurei Maasiyot (Tales). The Yiddish edition comes from Yiddish Wikisource, and the English translation was edited by Nissim Kaufmann, PhD, on English Wikisource. Both are used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license; this project’s presentation of them is shared under the same terms.
Der Leyner is free to use and runs on donations, which cover the cost of the AI tutoring. If it’s useful to you, contributions are warmly appreciated. Questions, corrections, and suggestions are welcome at leyner.app@gmail.com.