> I wanted to be able to read german (books etc) rather than being able to converse in german. German can be quite tricky in this regard, in that the written a

> I wanted to be able to read german (books etc) rather than being able to converse in german. German can be quite tricky in this regard, in that the written and the spoken language can be quite different grammatically. One basic example that immediately springs to mind is that the simple past (Präteritum) is used very little in speech but very extensively in writing. This means that, when reading German books, one encounters lots of verb forms they'd never hear in speech (which, I'm guessing, would make it unlikely that Duolingo teaches them?)