list of ladino learning resources
ladino, (d)juezmo, (d)judio, (d)judeo-espanyol is an endangered jewish language spoken by sefardi jews in communities in israel, the balkans, turkey and the americas. although historically written in rashi script (or solitreo, rashi’s cursive form) judezmo is mostly written phonetically, with latin letters.
ladino is at very precarious point in it’s history and at risk of dying, but is experiencing a revival on the internet!!
feel free to add anything you know of, and i’ll keep this updated as i find more things!
alice’s adventures in wonderland in ladino. sometimes these things tend to have kind of stilted, unnatural language (i have read the yiddish version from this same series and its not ungrammatical, just, like, uncomfortable). that being said, lots of interesting vocabulary could be learned from it!
un ramo de poemas // a bouquet of poems by haim vitali sadacca a bilingual book of poetry by a beautiful poet.
beginners ladino by alla markova one of the only beginners textbooks of ladino, and it comes with audio. a physical copy is ridiculously expensive, but there’s a kindle edition for $30 which is a little more reasonable.
the muestra lingua section in ladino of esefarad, a blog that’s mostly in spanish about sefardi topics. the ladino section in particular really focuses on sephardi history and culture and is very interesting.
şalom, a turkish jewish magazine, has a small section in ladino. it looks like they only post the most recent articles online (there are two articles, but they’re from this week) so check often and save articles for studying.
aki yerushalayim, an israeli ladino magazine. they also only have their most recent issue online, but they only publish twice a year so you have plenty of time to study it, and their international subscription is only $40.
diksionario de ladinokomunita is the best online ladino dictionary i’ve seen so far. it’s still not amazing but certainly better than any of its competition and it’s a work in progress by the members of ladinokomunita.
two websites for different parts of the same group, ladinokomunita. first, their yahoo groups page, which is pretty popular, several hundred members and several posts a week. then there’s their website, where they’ve got like 10 or 15 articles about sefardi topics. these are the same people who are building the dictionary above.
a quick barebones video lesson on how to write solitreo, the cursive version of the rashi hebrew script traditionally used to write judezmo.
קול ישראל בלאדינו // kol yisrael beladino, an israel radio station’s ladino news section. not the most interesting thing in the world but can still be interesting to listen to.
