14 ms·

A foundation course in reading German

327 points by romes 7y ago

irrational 7y ago
I'd love to see this sort of thing in many languages. I have no interest in conversational language learning or being able to write in any language. My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern).
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  English language literature has had characters like Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication. Did this happen in other languages as well? I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language.
  - eurg 7y ago
    Newspapers and literature are quite distinct. Good authors do not require the smokescreen that typical journalists use. Whatever the language.
  - Swizec 7y ago
    If you have nothing to say, you make it complicated to fill space. You see this in English, too.
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      Don't get me started about Crystalmark dumbed down English campaign. That's these folks: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html. They espouse short words that they then misapply, and the result isn't even easier to understand.
  - LeonidasXIV 7y ago
    > I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language. That might be the case, but in a way it is a topic of pride in Germany to use complicated words since that means you're educated. Bonus points if you use a word with latin roots. I like to use this fact when writing documents to companies, if your writing sounds like a lawyer, they are more likely to comply to your demands. Official writing and street-usage is very different though, of course and the same is true for English as well.
    - fwn 7y ago
      This is a cliche. There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words. ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!) I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice. Of course that doesn't mean that people don't use language consciously. It's just not that one way of talking can be assumed to be the default for everyone.
      - groovy2shoes 7y ago
        > This is a cliche. It's not, really. At least, not in the sense that it doesn't actually happen. What GP describes is part of the sociolinguistic phenomenon of “register” [1], wherein people have different little context-dependent “dialects” or “styles” that they use in different situations: for example, you might use a different sublanguage when speaking at home than you'd use at work, and even that one might be different from one you'd use in a job interview, or giving a TED talk, or writing a paper for CACM, vel sim. A particularly well-known, if extreme, example would be “babytalk”. The obverse of babytalk,—uh—“smartypantstalk”, seems to be a perennial literary criticism throughout history, sometimes famously so (Mark Twain (v. James Fenimore Cooper) and Ernest Hemingway (v. William Faulkner) come to mind). > There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words. Although registers and register-switching are a natural part of language (and people switch between registers all the time without even being aware of it), I think it also true that different people have different registers for the same situations. So, perhaps your casual register seems to many of your speech partners more like their own formal register, or otherwise more like what they expect a formal register to seem like. Or maybe you were raised in an environment where the formal register was perfectly appropriate for use in casual contexts, and so it actually is your formal register (which just so happens to also be your casual register). In fact, I think it might be harder to reduce your vocabulary than to build it, since in adding words you need not consider any particular speech partner or their understanding, but in removing words you must consider many possible speech partners and whatever you might know of their vocabularies, to make effective decisions about which words need removed. I imagine it involves a lot of trial and error. > I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice. This is certainly true, and one of the main topics of sociolinguistics. The particulars of our speech as perceived by our listeners are used to infer a deal of paralinguistic (and usually social) information, right or wrong (factually or morally). This is one of the reasons for register-switching: if I'd written this comment in the same register I'd use to talk to my 8-year-old nephew, I suspect you'd come away feeling rather confused and put-off (or you might infer that I'm mentally handicapped); on the other hand, I doubt my nephew would understand much of this comment as-is. By register-switching, I'm able to optimize my language not only for an appropriate level of linguistic competence, but also for an appropriate social setting, depending on how I want to be perceived, and how I want my listeners to judge my own perceptions of themselves. In some sense it's tactical, but it's a mostly subconscious and automatic operation, instinctive and reflexive, a natural part of language. I think, however, there's something worth keeping in mind: depending on the situation or context, speakers of even standard dialects can be subject to prejudices. This is more seldom and, in most cases, less consequential (I think) than what speakers of non-standard dialects have to deal with, but, myself being a native speaker of “General American”, it's something I've experienced first-hand. I think that, perhaps, it has less to do with “standardness” per se than with the prestige associated with the dialect—it just happens that standard dialects are also usually prestigious. At the same time, I think the prejudices come from usual in-group vs. out-group dynamics, where your dialect can be a pretty distinct marker of your membership status. (I'm not much of a sociologist, however). > ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!) I know this is difficult— Good luck! :) -- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
  - leipert 7y ago
    Depends. Usually (German) news papers cater an audience which wants to read things in a "more complicated" way. I don't know your level of proficiency and which publications you looked it, usually magazines and news papers might try to be more playful with language as well, this could be what is making it more exhausting to read it. If I am perfectly honest, reading articles and things written by non-native English speakers is easier for me. If I read articles in WSJ, Washington Post, Guardian, etc. it is harder to comprehend and takes more time to understand, compared to a Medium article or blog post written by a non-journalist.
  - diego_moita 7y ago
    > English language literature has had [...] Orson Welles ????? Orson Welles was a movie director. Did you misspell Oscar Wilde?
    - Gravityloss 7y ago
      You are right. I meant George Orwell!
      - machinecoffee 7y ago
        >who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication I hope you're not referring to NewSpeak from 1984 which was an invention by the party to limit people's expression so that they could not verbalize disloyalty, and therefore not even think it. A horrible example of state control.
        Gravityloss 7y ago
        George Orwell - Politics and the English Language : https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
- symplee 7y ago
  (removed - since this reply was for a different comment)
  - yorwba 7y ago
    Alternatively, for human-translated sentences (some with audio) check out https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org
- melling 7y ago
  I have an iOS app that helps people learn their first 100 words in several different languages. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237 I have several other apps but they don’t have a progression for working with a small group of words at a time. At some point, I’ll revise them to be like the 100 Word app.
  - FabHK 7y ago
    That's sort of the opposite though. The article here is not about words (which you can look up in a dictionary), but everything else, namely how the words are put together and what typical grammatical constructs mean.
- HuShifang 7y ago
  American universities often have courses designed precisely for this purpose, intended for graduate students who need to be able to read scholarship in language X (often called "X for Reading Knowledge”). And the courses often stick pretty close to the textbooks, which are often written to support self-study. Off the top of my head, there are books intended for English speakers who want to read scholarly French (Sandberg), German (Jannach & Kolb, Sandberg again, and of course this site), and Russian (forget the author, but it was published a while back by Slavica). There are some similar books for Latin and Ancient Greek too, I think, that follow similar approaches. Most of the old ones are like this, obviously, but a few new ones also reject the trend of teaching them as if they were lively living languages. BUT it's rare to find such books for languages that are very different from English. (Russian and Greek are already arguably pushing it.) Take Japanese, for example. There are courses and lately even some books (e.g. Josh Fogel's) meant for English-native scholars who know Chinese already to get up to speed in reading Japanese faster, but you don't have many (recognizable, at least, without knowledge of katakana) English cognates to rely upon, the grammar is drastically different, etc.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    There are no courses that focus on that approach for East Asian languages, but the material exists. Many polyglots are of the opinion that reading-first is the fastest way to mastery. Not to conversational skill, but full mastery. They’ve filled the gaps. There are good approaches to learning both Chinese and Japanese, but especially Japanese through reading. Start with Heisig to learn the characters, then a source of sentence forms like Kanji.Odessey.2001, then a couple of different textbooks to transition into longer form writing. Then read, read, read for hours a day and never stop.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      Is there a reference list of these resources?
      - garmaine 7y ago
        Isn’t that what you’re replying to?
- Razengan 7y ago
  > My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern). If I could choose to have any one superpower I'd pick the ability to instantly comprehend any language. It's literally like exploring entire new worlds.
  - mike_hock 7y ago
    It's also literally like exploring entirely new words.
- wrp 7y ago
  These are the texts I used back in the day: Daub. 1975. Comprehending Technical Japanese. Gould. 1972. Russian for the Mathematician. Stack. 1986. Reading French in Arts and Sciences, 4/e. Franco & Sandberg. 1998. Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course.
- jhedwards 7y ago
  For classical Chinese that would be An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A Fuller. That will open you up to most pre-modern Chinese lit.
  - HuShifang 7y ago
    Second this - I think it's the strongest textbook out there. Paul Kroll's dictionary (which is also available on the Pleco app) might be a good complement.
- dorchadas 7y ago
  For Latin you might like Lingua Latina per se illustrata. It teaches Latin solely through Latin itself, starting with simple sentences. As such, it's mostly focused on reading Latin. You can also look for the "Nature Method" books available in Italian and French (and there's supposedly a Russian one, but I haven't found a scan of it and only know of one copy hidden away in a university library in the US). It's my goal to be able to update these one day, but I believe they're still under copyright except in the US.
  - novalis78 7y ago
    Lingua Latina seconded. It’s a tremendously powerful to acquire Latin on such an intuitive level that you will find yourself thinking in Latin after a while. A lot of fun!
ggambetta 7y ago
I've found that the main difficulty in learning a new language is not so much in picking up structure, but vocabulary! This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second. I happen to be learning German and Latvian right now. The way I'm approaching them is to find easy-level texts (https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de for German, children's books for Latvian), and reading a couple of paragraphs. Whenever I find a word I don't know, I use Google Translate, and add it to a custom Anki deck. Then I practice vocabulary every day. This is a slightly more structured way of how I learned English back in the day (my English improved tremendously by playing Monkey Island, especially trying to understand the pirate insults).
- jeffwass 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, how do you find learning two languages at once?
  - ggambetta 7y ago
    They don't really interfere much. Good question, though; I thought they would. My girlfriend (Latvian, and the reason I'm learning the language) says there's a lot of Latvian words adapted from German (due to long occupations over time), but I haven't really found them yet. Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? My native language is Spanish, and I can get a decent sense of meaning from texts in Portuguese and Italian. We went to the Louvre last year, and I could also understand some French. My girlfriend, however, couldn't understand a word, despite being fluent (but not native) in Spanish.
    - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
      >Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? Often two languages share a word, but it's much less common (or even obscure) in one of them and it's unlikely that non-natives know it. For example, "die Kartoffel" means "potato" in german, while in in polish it's "ziemniak", so they aren't similar at all. However, polish also has "kartofel" which is a word that every native speaker knows, but you won't find it in e.g. newspapers.
lucb1e 7y ago
Just as a tip to those who find the text somewhat light (too light grey, perhaps also a little thin): there are add-ons that can turn off CSS and make it easier on the eyes. For me, turning off CSS and making the browser window a little less wide makes the "book" (website) a lot nicer to read. Screenshot without CSS: https://snipboard.io/tkyu9Z.jpg https://snipboard.io/tkyu9Z.jpg Add-on that I used: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-toggler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-toggler/
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  "reader mode" works too (eg in Firefox).
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    True! That's a thing these days (I've been using this for longer than reader mode exists). Somehow I don't like it as much (I keep tweaking the settings and never find one that I like), but indeed I guess that is the more modern looking and easier way of doing this (no third party add-on needed).
dspig 7y ago
This technical approach is how I tried and failed to learn German. In the end what worked was exposure/absorption and getting a feel for what sounds right - the same way I learnt my native language.
- romes 7y ago
  I agree that you it would be very hard to know a language approaching it from a completely technical standpoint... In sharing this link I'm not advocating a total technical approach! As for exposure/absorption you are completely right, I have attempted to create a mini Germany head space. What I'm doing and recommend to whoever interested: - I switched my Phone's language to Deutsch. When searching the web I end up with results in German that I try to comprehend if I have time: looking up the word on the translator (and less often on an online german dictionary - which i should be doing more) -I started listening to songs in German (I came to like the first albums by Tocotronic) -I have joined a discord server titled "German Learning And Discussion" (should anyone want to search for it) , if I have time at night I join a call with a couple of natives and learners. -I check Duolingo's stories and exercises now and then, although not my favourite methodology.
  - novaRom 7y ago
    Don't forget r/de on Reddit
    - romes 7y ago
      oh! definitely going to check that out. thank you!
    - siruncledrew 7y ago
      The memes and comments there actually helped me a lot with learning expressions, idioms, and “shorthand” that modern German speakers use. Little everyday nuances I would have missed from just reading books.
      - quelltext 7y ago
Tomte 7y ago
As a native speaker I find it fascinating to read through the course. OT: is there a good source for interlinear translations of texts on the Internet? In whatever languages? I‘ve never come across such a source.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Two thoughts, oh wait, three thoughts ... The Holy Bible (bible.cc/gospelcom.com), patent documents (espacenet), and _maybe_ for a limited set of languages statutory documentation from countries with multiple languages (or eg the EU: perhaps europa.eu)? Is that the sort of thing?
- yorwba 7y ago
  Have you tried searching for "interlinear translations"? Got plenty of Bible translations, but also https://interlinearbooks.com/ https://interlinearbooks.com/
gandalfian 7y ago
I worry I will learn the wrong pronunciation if I don't sort that out first.
- romes 7y ago
  Both practice and theory should be part of learning, refer to an earlier comment of mine for how i'm handling that
Koshkin 7y ago
I wish German was the language of international communication (rather than English; I love English but I don’t like it, and I am yet to meet a non-native speaker who wouldn’t have a horrible accent and who wouldn’t make a lot of mistakes). German is the modern Latin.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  Maybe it's because when you meet non-native speakers that don't have an accent you don't know it.
- tehabe 7y ago
  German is the modern Latin? I wonder what you mean by that? It is a complex language and these three genders which are baked into everything makes it a hard to adjust into a modern world in which gender is understood as a spectrum (or multiple spectra).
- LeonidasXIV 7y ago
  I strongly contest that, I have found many Dutch people to be impeccable to the point of being preferable to native dialects like what people e.g. in Manchester speak. Similar goes for many people from Denmark and Southern Sweden. That said, Germans often speak English like it was German indeed.
- zwieback 7y ago
  Disagree, German is my native tongue but I think it's overly complex. Has the advantage of being more phonetic than English, though.
- wenc 7y ago
  German was the language of science in Europe before it was supplanted by English. It's unfair that English should be the international lingua franca. But we can't change two facts of history: the British Empire, and America. I agree English is not a particularly logical or phonetic language. However it has two things going for it -- it's easy to speak badly and it is easy to extend. Its grammar is simpler than most Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages (that I'm aware of -- correct me if I'm wrong). And being a mongrel language, it's used to absorbing other languages. Plus no need to come up with a grammatical gender for every neologism or loanword. Chai latte? Done. Twitter? Done. Whereas in German, is it "der Tic-tac" or "die Tic-tac"? Or default to "das Tic-tac" since we don't know the origin of the word? This matters because the endings in all four cases of German depend on the grammatical gender. For instance, in the dative case, if it's "die Tic-tac", then it's "mit der Tic-tac", otherwise it is "mit dem Tic-Tac". Or in accusative, if it's "der Tic-tac" then it's "fuer den Tic-Tac". And then you have to get everyone to agree (for instance, der Joghurt or das Joghurt? depends where you are.) In practice it's not a big deal obviously (neologisms enter the German language all the time), but in English there's just less friction and fuss. English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular consensus (more or less -- there are still rules).
jobigoud 7y ago
> If you need help with English grammar while working through this textbook, we recommend, for example, English Grammar for Students of German I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish? I'm a French native speaker trying to improve my Spanish at the moment. Should I brush up on French shenanigans (yes even native speakers make mistakes and need reference material) from a Romance language point of view?
- LeonidasXIV 7y ago
  > I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish? Quite a lot, since even though English is a very strange Germanic language it is at its core in many ways still Germanic, so it has a large overlap with German that it does not at all share with Slavic languages like Polish. It also shares a lot with Danish (which I find to often sit somewhere in the middle between English and German) and I presume Dutch as well. So yes, that book might very well be helpful in learning Dutch too, it is just a way smaller niche. Source: I could be considered a native speaker of both German and Polish.
- leipert 7y ago
  Ha, native German speaker here. In our native language things like word order in sentences (e.g. subject-object-verb), gender* (is a lake female or male?), conjugating, tenses and Kasus (grammatical cases) come more or less natural to us. Personally I think it helps if you understand your own Grammar in order to learn a different language. So it definitely can help if a text book points out how your _own_ languages Grammar works and how it differs from the language you are trying to learn. Learning latin in school helped me a great deal understanding etymology of words in English, Roman languages and Grammar in general. When I took Linguistics in university it opened my eyes about the quirkiness of German (and English) grammar. We always used English for examples, as German has more exceptions.
- petecox 7y ago
  There's a companion volume for Spanish learners, i.e. The publisher likely just tweaks a chapter or two for each specific target language, i.e. English Grammar for Students of $X. The 'surprising specific' bit is in how concepts in German/Spanish map to their English equivalents. e.g. the German edition might try and show how English emulates declensions with prepositions, while the Spanish might explain how the auxilary verb 'have' has multiple uses covered by tener/haber. I'm not a native Romance speaker but yes, knowing 'French shenanigans' would perhaps help understand the other - when I learned Catalan on duolingo (from Spanish), I made more blunders in my rusty Spanish than in mistakes in the Catalan I was trying to learn!
tom_mellior 7y ago
Maybe I'm being too pedantic, but I found some errors on the first few pages and am wondering about the accuracy of the rest. https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/ https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/: "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996, i.e., since before much of this book's audience was born. "beeinflüssen" should be "beeinflussen". https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender-nominative-case/ https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender-no...: Not an error of German per se, but I find "memorizing the gender of every noun is not particularly important" and "It is recommended that, as you learn the nouns you choose to memorize, you learn each noun with its definite article" contradictory and confusing. On the same page: "All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are feminine." Counterexamples I came up with in a minute or so: der Brei, das Allerlei, das Benzin. The reason is that in these cases -ei and -in are not suffixes in the same sense as they are in the common case illustrated by the authors' examples, but a beginner would not be able to tell. This feels like it could be a better resource with more attention to small details.
- molticrystal 7y ago
  This book seems to be content grandfathered in since a 1975 course and thus will likely have lots of obsolete material, despite being revised and compiled into newer editions as the most major change was likely 1995 as it says in the below quote, which would likely explain the pre-1996 "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" spelling. There was a 3rd edition in 2001 but they probably didn't manage to get to the issue. It is now a "open textbook was launched publicly on 22 October 2014 and is revised continually" so I would imagine they would be very pleased to see your corrections. >The second edition of this textbook was published in 1995 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, copyright Howard Martin, primarily edited by Sue Tyson. Earlier versions apparently date back at least to a University of Wisconsin-Extension Independent Study course guide titled “A Guide to Reading German” “revised and expanded” by Howard Martin and published in 1975.
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    > I would imagine they would be very pleased to see your corrections. The page in question was last revised in 2017, 21 years after the reform. Clicking on one of the most recent revisions, https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/common-da-words/ https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/common-da-word..., revised on December 10, 2018, I see that they spell "nass" as "naß". If they missed this, I'd say they don't care. I certainly don't care enough to go through all occurrences of ß in this book and point out to them which ones to fix.
snambi 7y ago
interesting.. what is the value in learning German?
- unethical_ban 7y ago
  What is the value of learning any second language? Expanding cultural understanding, increasing the number of places you can travel and be at ease. German may not be as useful universally as Chinese or English, but there are about 90,000,000 speakers of it, so.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
vonnik 7y ago
I'd just like to point out that University of Wisconsin's German department has been putting out great German learning material for about 100 years now. If you're lucky enough to live in a university town with used book stores and a foreign language section, you may find old primers there. There's even a dialect of German called Wisconsin High German: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_German
bayesian_horse 7y ago
I would recommend the Duolingo German from English course instead. It has an app, so you can practice wherever you are, it has grammar, audio, speech recognition, spaced repitition (how ever much you want of that) and gameification. Duolingo courses and exercises are also improved through data-based methods. I have completed Spanish, Mandarin and Norwegian. The Spanish and Norwegian ones are very comprehensive, the Mandarin tops off at around 1000 words. German also seems to be one of their most polished languages, contrasted with courses in Hawaiian and Navajo.
- misja 7y ago
  I like Duolingo because it is so accessible, however I found that it doesn't bring you up to the level where you are able to speak a language in practice. For instance, I completed the entire French course but I still can't have even a basic conversation when I'm in France.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Did you keep the skills at level 1? What do you think is holding you back? Is it that you don't know how to form a sentence, are you unsure to come up with the right words, do you think the course didn't contain the words you need? In my opinion the Duolingo course does contain the necessary words, phrases and grammar for holding a conversation. But it may not be enough to understand native speakers at native speeds. And maybe you need to be more confident! I would recommend listening to French podcasts or videos even if you don't understand them. With subtitles if available.
    - misja 7y ago
      >> Did you keep the skills at level 1? I went through all the levels. >> What do you think is holding you back? What was holding me back was: 1. Spoken French goes much faster than the French spoken in the course so I wasn't able to understand most of it. 2. To form a sentence to express yourself in real life is much more difficult than to translate a given English sentence like in DuoLingo. I agree that to be able to use a language you need to do more than just follow a course like DuoLingo; you have to read books, watch television and most important practice it in real life.

327 points by romes 7y ago

I'd love to see this sort of thing in many languages. I have no interest in conversational language learning or being able to write in any language. My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern).

Gravityloss 7y ago
English language literature has had characters like Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication. Did this happen in other languages as well? I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language.
- eurg 7y ago
  Newspapers and literature are quite distinct. Good authors do not require the smokescreen that typical journalists use. Whatever the language.
- Swizec 7y ago
  If you have nothing to say, you make it complicated to fill space. You see this in English, too.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    Don't get me started about Crystalmark dumbed down English campaign. That's these folks: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html. They espouse short words that they then misapply, and the result isn't even easier to understand.
- LeonidasXIV 7y ago
  > I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language. That might be the case, but in a way it is a topic of pride in Germany to use complicated words since that means you're educated. Bonus points if you use a word with latin roots. I like to use this fact when writing documents to companies, if your writing sounds like a lawyer, they are more likely to comply to your demands. Official writing and street-usage is very different though, of course and the same is true for English as well.
  - fwn 7y ago
    This is a cliche. There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words. ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!) I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice. Of course that doesn't mean that people don't use language consciously. It's just not that one way of talking can be assumed to be the default for everyone.
    - groovy2shoes 7y ago
      > This is a cliche. It's not, really. At least, not in the sense that it doesn't actually happen. What GP describes is part of the sociolinguistic phenomenon of “register” [1], wherein people have different little context-dependent “dialects” or “styles” that they use in different situations: for example, you might use a different sublanguage when speaking at home than you'd use at work, and even that one might be different from one you'd use in a job interview, or giving a TED talk, or writing a paper for CACM, vel sim. A particularly well-known, if extreme, example would be “babytalk”. The obverse of babytalk,—uh—“smartypantstalk”, seems to be a perennial literary criticism throughout history, sometimes famously so (Mark Twain (v. James Fenimore Cooper) and Ernest Hemingway (v. William Faulkner) come to mind). > There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words. Although registers and register-switching are a natural part of language (and people switch between registers all the time without even being aware of it), I think it also true that different people have different registers for the same situations. So, perhaps your casual register seems to many of your speech partners more like their own formal register, or otherwise more like what they expect a formal register to seem like. Or maybe you were raised in an environment where the formal register was perfectly appropriate for use in casual contexts, and so it actually is your formal register (which just so happens to also be your casual register). In fact, I think it might be harder to reduce your vocabulary than to build it, since in adding words you need not consider any particular speech partner or their understanding, but in removing words you must consider many possible speech partners and whatever you might know of their vocabularies, to make effective decisions about which words need removed. I imagine it involves a lot of trial and error. > I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice. This is certainly true, and one of the main topics of sociolinguistics. The particulars of our speech as perceived by our listeners are used to infer a deal of paralinguistic (and usually social) information, right or wrong (factually or morally). This is one of the reasons for register-switching: if I'd written this comment in the same register I'd use to talk to my 8-year-old nephew, I suspect you'd come away feeling rather confused and put-off (or you might infer that I'm mentally handicapped); on the other hand, I doubt my nephew would understand much of this comment as-is. By register-switching, I'm able to optimize my language not only for an appropriate level of linguistic competence, but also for an appropriate social setting, depending on how I want to be perceived, and how I want my listeners to judge my own perceptions of themselves. In some sense it's tactical, but it's a mostly subconscious and automatic operation, instinctive and reflexive, a natural part of language. I think, however, there's something worth keeping in mind: depending on the situation or context, speakers of even standard dialects can be subject to prejudices. This is more seldom and, in most cases, less consequential (I think) than what speakers of non-standard dialects have to deal with, but, myself being a native speaker of “General American”, it's something I've experienced first-hand. I think that, perhaps, it has less to do with “standardness” per se than with the prestige associated with the dialect—it just happens that standard dialects are also usually prestigious. At the same time, I think the prejudices come from usual in-group vs. out-group dynamics, where your dialect can be a pretty distinct marker of your membership status. (I'm not much of a sociologist, however). > ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!) I know this is difficult— Good luck! :) -- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
- leipert 7y ago
  Depends. Usually (German) news papers cater an audience which wants to read things in a "more complicated" way. I don't know your level of proficiency and which publications you looked it, usually magazines and news papers might try to be more playful with language as well, this could be what is making it more exhausting to read it. If I am perfectly honest, reading articles and things written by non-native English speakers is easier for me. If I read articles in WSJ, Washington Post, Guardian, etc. it is harder to comprehend and takes more time to understand, compared to a Medium article or blog post written by a non-journalist.
- diego_moita 7y ago
  > English language literature has had [...] Orson Welles ????? Orson Welles was a movie director. Did you misspell Oscar Wilde?
  - Gravityloss 7y ago
    You are right. I meant George Orwell!
    - machinecoffee 7y ago
      >who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication I hope you're not referring to NewSpeak from 1984 which was an invention by the party to limit people's expression so that they could not verbalize disloyalty, and therefore not even think it. A horrible example of state control.
      - Gravityloss 7y ago
        George Orwell - Politics and the English Language : https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
symplee 7y ago
(removed - since this reply was for a different comment)
- yorwba 7y ago
  Alternatively, for human-translated sentences (some with audio) check out https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org
melling 7y ago
I have an iOS app that helps people learn their first 100 words in several different languages. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237 I have several other apps but they don’t have a progression for working with a small group of words at a time. At some point, I’ll revise them to be like the 100 Word app.
- FabHK 7y ago
  That's sort of the opposite though. The article here is not about words (which you can look up in a dictionary), but everything else, namely how the words are put together and what typical grammatical constructs mean.
HuShifang 7y ago
American universities often have courses designed precisely for this purpose, intended for graduate students who need to be able to read scholarship in language X (often called "X for Reading Knowledge”). And the courses often stick pretty close to the textbooks, which are often written to support self-study. Off the top of my head, there are books intended for English speakers who want to read scholarly French (Sandberg), German (Jannach & Kolb, Sandberg again, and of course this site), and Russian (forget the author, but it was published a while back by Slavica). There are some similar books for Latin and Ancient Greek too, I think, that follow similar approaches. Most of the old ones are like this, obviously, but a few new ones also reject the trend of teaching them as if they were lively living languages. BUT it's rare to find such books for languages that are very different from English. (Russian and Greek are already arguably pushing it.) Take Japanese, for example. There are courses and lately even some books (e.g. Josh Fogel's) meant for English-native scholars who know Chinese already to get up to speed in reading Japanese faster, but you don't have many (recognizable, at least, without knowledge of katakana) English cognates to rely upon, the grammar is drastically different, etc.
- garmaine 7y ago
  There are no courses that focus on that approach for East Asian languages, but the material exists. Many polyglots are of the opinion that reading-first is the fastest way to mastery. Not to conversational skill, but full mastery. They’ve filled the gaps. There are good approaches to learning both Chinese and Japanese, but especially Japanese through reading. Start with Heisig to learn the characters, then a source of sentence forms like Kanji.Odessey.2001, then a couple of different textbooks to transition into longer form writing. Then read, read, read for hours a day and never stop.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Is there a reference list of these resources?
    - garmaine 7y ago
      Isn’t that what you’re replying to?
Razengan 7y ago
> My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern). If I could choose to have any one superpower I'd pick the ability to instantly comprehend any language. It's literally like exploring entire new worlds.
- mike_hock 7y ago
  It's also literally like exploring entirely new words.
wrp 7y ago
These are the texts I used back in the day: Daub. 1975. Comprehending Technical Japanese. Gould. 1972. Russian for the Mathematician. Stack. 1986. Reading French in Arts and Sciences, 4/e. Franco & Sandberg. 1998. Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course.
jhedwards 7y ago
For classical Chinese that would be An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A Fuller. That will open you up to most pre-modern Chinese lit.
- HuShifang 7y ago
  Second this - I think it's the strongest textbook out there. Paul Kroll's dictionary (which is also available on the Pleco app) might be a good complement.
dorchadas 7y ago
For Latin you might like Lingua Latina per se illustrata. It teaches Latin solely through Latin itself, starting with simple sentences. As such, it's mostly focused on reading Latin. You can also look for the "Nature Method" books available in Italian and French (and there's supposedly a Russian one, but I haven't found a scan of it and only know of one copy hidden away in a university library in the US). It's my goal to be able to update these one day, but I believe they're still under copyright except in the US.
- novalis78 7y ago
  Lingua Latina seconded. It’s a tremendously powerful to acquire Latin on such an intuitive level that you will find yourself thinking in Latin after a while. A lot of fun!

ggambetta 7y ago

I've found that the main difficulty in learning a new language is not so much in picking up structure, but vocabulary! This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second. I happen to be learning German and Latvian right now. The way I'm approaching them is to find easy-level texts (https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de for German, children's books for Latvian), and reading a couple of paragraphs. Whenever I find a word I don't know, I use Google Translate, and add it to a custom Anki deck. Then I practice vocabulary every day. This is a slightly more structured way of how I learned English back in the day (my English improved tremendously by playing Monkey Island, especially trying to understand the pirate insults).

jeffwass 7y ago
Out of curiosity, how do you find learning two languages at once?
- ggambetta 7y ago
  They don't really interfere much. Good question, though; I thought they would. My girlfriend (Latvian, and the reason I'm learning the language) says there's a lot of Latvian words adapted from German (due to long occupations over time), but I haven't really found them yet. Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? My native language is Spanish, and I can get a decent sense of meaning from texts in Portuguese and Italian. We went to the Louvre last year, and I could also understand some French. My girlfriend, however, couldn't understand a word, despite being fluent (but not native) in Spanish.
  - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
    >Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? Often two languages share a word, but it's much less common (or even obscure) in one of them and it's unlikely that non-natives know it. For example, "die Kartoffel" means "potato" in german, while in in polish it's "ziemniak", so they aren't similar at all. However, polish also has "kartofel" which is a word that every native speaker knows, but you won't find it in e.g. newspapers.

lucb1e 7y ago

Just as a tip to those who find the text somewhat light (too light grey, perhaps also a little thin): there are add-ons that can turn off CSS and make it easier on the eyes. For me, turning off CSS and making the browser window a little less wide makes the "book" (website) a lot nicer to read. Screenshot without CSS: https://snipboard.io/tkyu9Z.jpg https://snipboard.io/tkyu9Z.jpg Add-on that I used: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-toggler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-toggler/

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
"reader mode" works too (eg in Firefox).
- lucb1e 7y ago
  True! That's a thing these days (I've been using this for longer than reader mode exists). Somehow I don't like it as much (I keep tweaking the settings and never find one that I like), but indeed I guess that is the more modern looking and easier way of doing this (no third party add-on needed).

dspig 7y ago

This technical approach is how I tried and failed to learn German. In the end what worked was exposure/absorption and getting a feel for what sounds right - the same way I learnt my native language.

romes 7y ago
I agree that you it would be very hard to know a language approaching it from a completely technical standpoint... In sharing this link I'm not advocating a total technical approach! As for exposure/absorption you are completely right, I have attempted to create a mini Germany head space. What I'm doing and recommend to whoever interested: - I switched my Phone's language to Deutsch. When searching the web I end up with results in German that I try to comprehend if I have time: looking up the word on the translator (and less often on an online german dictionary - which i should be doing more) -I started listening to songs in German (I came to like the first albums by Tocotronic) -I have joined a discord server titled "German Learning And Discussion" (should anyone want to search for it) , if I have time at night I join a call with a couple of natives and learners. -I check Duolingo's stories and exercises now and then, although not my favourite methodology.
- novaRom 7y ago
  Don't forget r/de on Reddit
  - romes 7y ago
    oh! definitely going to check that out. thank you!
  - siruncledrew 7y ago
    The memes and comments there actually helped me a lot with learning expressions, idioms, and “shorthand” that modern German speakers use. Little everyday nuances I would have missed from just reading books.
    - quelltext 7y ago

Tomte 7y ago

As a native speaker I find it fascinating to read through the course. OT: is there a good source for interlinear translations of texts on the Internet? In whatever languages? I‘ve never come across such a source.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Two thoughts, oh wait, three thoughts ... The Holy Bible (bible.cc/gospelcom.com), patent documents (espacenet), and _maybe_ for a limited set of languages statutory documentation from countries with multiple languages (or eg the EU: perhaps europa.eu)? Is that the sort of thing?
yorwba 7y ago
Have you tried searching for "interlinear translations"? Got plenty of Bible translations, but also https://interlinearbooks.com/ https://interlinearbooks.com/

gandalfian 7y ago

I worry I will learn the wrong pronunciation if I don't sort that out first.

romes 7y ago
Both practice and theory should be part of learning, refer to an earlier comment of mine for how i'm handling that

Koshkin 7y ago

I wish German was the language of international communication (rather than English; I love English but I don’t like it, and I am yet to meet a non-native speaker who wouldn’t have a horrible accent and who wouldn’t make a lot of mistakes). German is the modern Latin.

jobigoud 7y ago
Maybe it's because when you meet non-native speakers that don't have an accent you don't know it.
tehabe 7y ago
German is the modern Latin? I wonder what you mean by that? It is a complex language and these three genders which are baked into everything makes it a hard to adjust into a modern world in which gender is understood as a spectrum (or multiple spectra).
LeonidasXIV 7y ago
I strongly contest that, I have found many Dutch people to be impeccable to the point of being preferable to native dialects like what people e.g. in Manchester speak. Similar goes for many people from Denmark and Southern Sweden. That said, Germans often speak English like it was German indeed.
zwieback 7y ago
Disagree, German is my native tongue but I think it's overly complex. Has the advantage of being more phonetic than English, though.
wenc 7y ago
German was the language of science in Europe before it was supplanted by English. It's unfair that English should be the international lingua franca. But we can't change two facts of history: the British Empire, and America. I agree English is not a particularly logical or phonetic language. However it has two things going for it -- it's easy to speak badly and it is easy to extend. Its grammar is simpler than most Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages (that I'm aware of -- correct me if I'm wrong). And being a mongrel language, it's used to absorbing other languages. Plus no need to come up with a grammatical gender for every neologism or loanword. Chai latte? Done. Twitter? Done. Whereas in German, is it "der Tic-tac" or "die Tic-tac"? Or default to "das Tic-tac" since we don't know the origin of the word? This matters because the endings in all four cases of German depend on the grammatical gender. For instance, in the dative case, if it's "die Tic-tac", then it's "mit der Tic-tac", otherwise it is "mit dem Tic-Tac". Or in accusative, if it's "der Tic-tac" then it's "fuer den Tic-Tac". And then you have to get everyone to agree (for instance, der Joghurt or das Joghurt? depends where you are.) In practice it's not a big deal obviously (neologisms enter the German language all the time), but in English there's just less friction and fuss. English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular consensus (more or less -- there are still rules).

jobigoud 7y ago

> If you need help with English grammar while working through this textbook, we recommend, for example, English Grammar for Students of German I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish? I'm a French native speaker trying to improve my Spanish at the moment. Should I brush up on French shenanigans (yes even native speakers make mistakes and need reference material) from a Romance language point of view?

LeonidasXIV 7y ago
> I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish? Quite a lot, since even though English is a very strange Germanic language it is at its core in many ways still Germanic, so it has a large overlap with German that it does not at all share with Slavic languages like Polish. It also shares a lot with Danish (which I find to often sit somewhere in the middle between English and German) and I presume Dutch as well. So yes, that book might very well be helpful in learning Dutch too, it is just a way smaller niche. Source: I could be considered a native speaker of both German and Polish.
leipert 7y ago
Ha, native German speaker here. In our native language things like word order in sentences (e.g. subject-object-verb), gender* (is a lake female or male?), conjugating, tenses and Kasus (grammatical cases) come more or less natural to us. Personally I think it helps if you understand your own Grammar in order to learn a different language. So it definitely can help if a text book points out how your _own_ languages Grammar works and how it differs from the language you are trying to learn. Learning latin in school helped me a great deal understanding etymology of words in English, Roman languages and Grammar in general. When I took Linguistics in university it opened my eyes about the quirkiness of German (and English) grammar. We always used English for examples, as German has more exceptions.
petecox 7y ago
There's a companion volume for Spanish learners, i.e. The publisher likely just tweaks a chapter or two for each specific target language, i.e. English Grammar for Students of $X. The 'surprising specific' bit is in how concepts in German/Spanish map to their English equivalents. e.g. the German edition might try and show how English emulates declensions with prepositions, while the Spanish might explain how the auxilary verb 'have' has multiple uses covered by tener/haber. I'm not a native Romance speaker but yes, knowing 'French shenanigans' would perhaps help understand the other - when I learned Catalan on duolingo (from Spanish), I made more blunders in my rusty Spanish than in mistakes in the Catalan I was trying to learn!

tom_mellior 7y ago

Maybe I'm being too pedantic, but I found some errors on the first few pages and am wondering about the accuracy of the rest. https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/ https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/: "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996, i.e., since before much of this book's audience was born. "beeinflüssen" should be "beeinflussen". https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender-nominative-case/ https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender-no...: Not an error of German per se, but I find "memorizing the gender of every noun is not particularly important" and "It is recommended that, as you learn the nouns you choose to memorize, you learn each noun with its definite article" contradictory and confusing. On the same page: "All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are feminine." Counterexamples I came up with in a minute or so: der Brei, das Allerlei, das Benzin. The reason is that in these cases -ei and -in are not suffixes in the same sense as they are in the common case illustrated by the authors' examples, but a beginner would not be able to tell. This feels like it could be a better resource with more attention to small details.

molticrystal 7y ago
This book seems to be content grandfathered in since a 1975 course and thus will likely have lots of obsolete material, despite being revised and compiled into newer editions as the most major change was likely 1995 as it says in the below quote, which would likely explain the pre-1996 "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" spelling. There was a 3rd edition in 2001 but they probably didn't manage to get to the issue. It is now a "open textbook was launched publicly on 22 October 2014 and is revised continually" so I would imagine they would be very pleased to see your corrections. >The second edition of this textbook was published in 1995 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, copyright Howard Martin, primarily edited by Sue Tyson. Earlier versions apparently date back at least to a University of Wisconsin-Extension Independent Study course guide titled “A Guide to Reading German” “revised and expanded” by Howard Martin and published in 1975.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  > I would imagine they would be very pleased to see your corrections. The page in question was last revised in 2017, 21 years after the reform. Clicking on one of the most recent revisions, https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/common-da-words/ https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/common-da-word..., revised on December 10, 2018, I see that they spell "nass" as "naß". If they missed this, I'd say they don't care. I certainly don't care enough to go through all occurrences of ß in this book and point out to them which ones to fix.

snambi 7y ago

interesting.. what is the value in learning German?

unethical_ban 7y ago
What is the value of learning any second language? Expanding cultural understanding, increasing the number of places you can travel and be at ease. German may not be as useful universally as Chinese or English, but there are about 90,000,000 speakers of it, so.
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vonnik 7y ago

I'd just like to point out that University of Wisconsin's German department has been putting out great German learning material for about 100 years now. If you're lucky enough to live in a university town with used book stores and a foreign language section, you may find old primers there. There's even a dialect of German called Wisconsin High German: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_German

bayesian_horse 7y ago

I would recommend the Duolingo German from English course instead. It has an app, so you can practice wherever you are, it has grammar, audio, speech recognition, spaced repitition (how ever much you want of that) and gameification. Duolingo courses and exercises are also improved through data-based methods. I have completed Spanish, Mandarin and Norwegian. The Spanish and Norwegian ones are very comprehensive, the Mandarin tops off at around 1000 words. German also seems to be one of their most polished languages, contrasted with courses in Hawaiian and Navajo.

misja 7y ago
I like Duolingo because it is so accessible, however I found that it doesn't bring you up to the level where you are able to speak a language in practice. For instance, I completed the entire French course but I still can't have even a basic conversation when I'm in France.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Did you keep the skills at level 1? What do you think is holding you back? Is it that you don't know how to form a sentence, are you unsure to come up with the right words, do you think the course didn't contain the words you need? In my opinion the Duolingo course does contain the necessary words, phrases and grammar for holding a conversation. But it may not be enough to understand native speakers at native speeds. And maybe you need to be more confident! I would recommend listening to French podcasts or videos even if you don't understand them. With subtitles if available.
  - misja 7y ago
    >> Did you keep the skills at level 1? I went through all the levels. >> What do you think is holding you back? What was holding me back was: 1. Spoken French goes much faster than the French spoken in the course so I wasn't able to understand most of it. 2. To form a sentence to express yourself in real life is much more difficult than to translate a given English sentence like in DuoLingo. I agree that to be able to use a language you need to do more than just follow a course like DuoLingo; you have to read books, watch television and most important practice it in real life.