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/: "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-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.
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.
> 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-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.
It's not that simple, I guess this refers to things like "Mongolei", "Spielerei" etc. where -ei will also never be a syllable on its own. You'll have to put a lot more context in for a rule like this.
The negation of a rule or of qualities is an effective language acquisition technique: a tree is not a bush, they are different in X ways; a book is not a magazine, they are different in X ways.
"Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996,
Which many adults I know continue to thumb their noses at, to this day (in personal communication, at least). In any case, arguably one needs to be aware of the pre-RSR spelling conventions to have a solid grip on the language as a whole. So I would prefer a reference that made us aware of both variants, actually.
As to feminine nouns -- good call. It's a difficult task to put together reference materials that are both comprehensive (and approachable) and obsessively accurate.
> In any case, arguably one needs to be aware of the pre-RSR spelling conventions to have a solid grip on the language as a whole.
Absolutely, but I'd argue that the first example in the book is not the best place to put this. Learners will at some point encounter pre-RSR texts (or personal communications that don't care about RSR or other standard language features), but much of what they are likely to encounter at the beginning will be newer texts that use the current conventions.
As someone who worked as a professional writer for many years I never understood why that reform was so inconsistent. After all it was supposed to simplify spelling. So why not go all the way and eradicate the 'ß' like they did in Switzerland. And this is just one of many examples.
The standard argument is that some words with different meanings (and pronunciations!) can only be distinguished by ss/ß in writing, e.g. "Masse" (mass) vs. "Maße" (measures). The first one has a short "a" sound, the second one has a long "a" sound.
In Standard German ss and ß don't have distinct pronunciations.
That was one of the goals of the spelling reform to make the use of ß more consistent and use simpler rules for it. Exactly because there is no difference in pronounciation between ss and ß.
You’re right, they are pronounced the same. What I was actually thinking about was the different pronunciations of the vowel before the ss/ß. In the word “Schoß” for example the ß tells you the the vowel is long and not short as it would be in the word “schoss”.
So what I’m trying to say is that s/ss/ß have distinct use cases which follow consistent rules.
> So why not go all the way and eradicate the 'ß' like they did in Switzerland.
Cultural identity and pride in one's lingual heritage play a part too. As a Dutchman, I like the German ß. Nothing conveys the notion of a foreign country better than another language and a differing orthography.
The ß even has a proper capital these days: ẞ. While no word ever begins with ẞ, you do need it when capitalising a whole word — e.g., on a sign.
Your issue with the esset I think is a little pedantic as it's really just a typography issue.
However the point about knowing noun articles is extremely important, and the more you stick with it from the beginning the easier it is when you are learning the different cases later on.
Good example for French, I wasn't aware of that one. I know that "image" is supposedly the only -age word in French that is not masculine. (Which BTW is confusing for French learners from German, since German adopted a bunch of French -age words, but as feminine words like die Garage.)
Anyway, just above the example in question, the authors manage to point to a rule that "usually" (their emphasis) holds, so they could just have written "usually" here as well. They could also have pointed out that the suffixes they list have the effect they state when added to a root that is a word in its own right: Bäcker-Bäckerei, heiter-Heiterkeit, Land-Landschaft etc. though admittedly this might add too much complexity this early on.
I learned German in Austria and I was taught a handful of words which we use a different article here as compared to in Germany. My recollection is that most of these words either were commercial, like Nutella, or loan words coming from other languages (e.g. not every loan word is neutral).
But while I did eventually get my C1, my German isn't great so I don't want to claim any expertise.
An example that comes to mind is butter. It's feminine (die Butter), but in some dialects, it's masculine (der Butter). There are maps for several other words at http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-5/f15a-f/, but I'd take them with a grain of salt. The region I grew up in doesn't really match what these maps say about it.
Oh, I know certain people in Bavaria calling "das Butter", suspicious people no doubt! Everybody knows it is "die Butter" with an option to settle for "der Butter"!
Nutella is a pathological example. It's a running gag among German speakers that they cannot figure out its gender. The discussion usually ends when someone suggests something like "das Nutellaglas" ("the jar of Nutella"), i.e. building a compound word so that the other part of the word imposes its gender.
A well-known example is "die/das Tram" (rather a Helvetism; this words means the same as in English; the more usual German word is "die Straßenbahn). In Standard German, "Tram" is considered as an abbreviation of "die Trambahn" - so it is female. In South Germany and Switzerland, "das Tram" is used.
Nutella is a proper noun and also a loanword, I was expecting native common noun pairs. (Btw the issue exists in French too for this word, and a few others like Wifi or Gameboy)
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 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).
I built a website (and soon an app) for learning German, that has a focus on both grammar and vocabulary. We have a frequency list with the top 5000 German words. And we are a video-driven site, so each word has a video. And most words also have sentences (also each with a video). This is good for getting a feel for the spoken language, and hearing the vocabulary used in context. You can check it out here: http://www.seedlang.com
I started with German about a year and a half ago via Mango Languages. I love the app because it approaches languages via phrases and conversations instead of vocabulary (like Duolingo)
Your site looks really promising... I will definitely give it a shot!
What was your driver for creating it? Language is a very competitive space these days.
I used Duolingo for a couple of languages, got pretty far in Italian and tried some German. I found it either too slow, or too beginner-ish; I didn't feel like I was learning much, and it didn't help me read news websites / novels much. While I do like the approach - specifically, the use of words in context, and the variety in exercises - it didn't really do it for me (Severin, if you're reading this - sorry, man!)
Duolingo starts at the beginning. If you think a skill is too easy, try testing out of it to get to a higher level or advance faster.
Duolingo says they don't currently aim too teach beyond A2/B1, so you may already be past that.
Having learnt a few languages with and without duolingo, I think you will usually need 2000+ words in a language, and close to 90% of the grammar to read native texts well. Duolingo can get you quite close to, but not past that mark.
Too true. I self taught German to a low C2 in 2 years or so as a native English speaker. I got to a very high level of grammar in a matter of months, but since vocabulary took far longer to acquire, I was left having most conversations sound like “I would have ___ if only I had known ____ was ____ing ____.
You're right! The book does not address the second difficulty at all. I agree that vocabulary is important, and reading a couple of paragraphs is in fact really productive (thank you for the link suggestion btw), however, in my opinion, having the gramatical understanding of the language will prove really helpful in reading. There are subtle changes in words depending on what role they fulfil in the sentence; trying to "just" memorize them without correlating it with the sentence aspects will be harder than to understand the wholeness of the process. Also, understanding how German builds much of its vocabulary leads to learning more vocabulary faster!
I generally agree. To be fair, my goal is to understand and be understood, not necessarily to express myself correctly - not at first, at least. I suppose it's similar to the way children learn?
My biggest issue with this is my dislike towards Anki. I really just don't like flascards, and I can never regularly study with Anki. It's quite sad, as my vocabulary in my second language (Irish) is easily the worst part. I've found that reading does help, though, even if not making it into flashcards on Anki.
I love the idea of anki but immediately tire of the execution. There are naturalistic ways to achieve the effects of spaced repetition, fortunately, like reading the works of a particular writer or playing games of a certain genre in the target language.
1. It needs parameter tuning. If you get everything right, you were re-shown cards too quickly. There's a variety of ways to tune how that happens, some by showing you cards further apart, and some by introducing more cards. Either way is fine for language learning, IMO.
2. Users hate the experience when the parameters are tuned correctly. It should be something of a struggle, and you should be failing about 20 percent of cards you see. When every card you see is on the cusp of forgetting, each card is legitimately cognitively taxing.
3. Flashcards don't really fit into society. College classes tend to be a series of topic focused exams, and once the exam has passed, any time spent on retention of knowledge gained competes with time for acquiring knowledge for the next exam. Also, folks tend not to like the idea of failing 20 percent of their exam questions due to forgetting.
In my opinion SR apps should not compute the repetition interval by themselves but rather ask the user.
After revealing the answer you should be able to say "repeat this soon, later, much later".
A different kind of app shouldn't use time at all but rather a queue of all words/cards and then put cards back a certain number of positions, depending on level and user input.
The queue system works a lot better with different timescales (practicing over short or long terms), and it doesn't tell you how much time you have to put in at any given day. It also takes less parameters, I think.
Yep. Sadly Irish is so small that I'm not going to find many games in it, but I'm at a comfortable B2 level (passed the exam twice, actually) and am reading just fine.
I just wish there was a good way to incorporate specific words into all that.
The way I used to learn a lot of words in many languages (mostly English) is to figure out what they mean in context and only if I really can't figure it out (because they are very broad or very specific) look it up and maybe try to remember the next time I encounter them.
That also has the advantage that you'll understand the common words first instead of what someone considered to be a sensible order (one of the first words I learned in French was the French word for parrot, which I have used exactly never since except for joking around with people who learned from the same textbook).
Some duolingo courses have funny "priorities" too.
But in general, by learning and repeating any words in a language you build the mental infrastructure to learn more words easier.
It is almost scary to me how easily I can memorize new Chinese vocabulary compared to a few years ago. You could say my brain was pre-trained as an autoencoder!
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.
That makes a lot of sense. I can think of examples in which I can associate a new German word to a perfectly valid, though less common, English word. And I'm not even a native English speaker.
>Maybe being native in the language makes a difference?
I think this is similar to understanding dialects. My native language is German and I can make sense of most German dialects (some are really hard tho' like Platt or Niederbayerisch). On the other hand, my English is proficient (CEFR C1/C2), but I regularly trip over dialects and even strong accents (Irish is especially hard). My personal guess is that you have memorized a much larger "network" of similar words (in meaning or sound) in your native language than in any language you learned in a structured/artificial way based on top of your native language.
Fun fact: At least here in Bavaria, we often say German is our first foreign language and our dialect is our actual native language. So we already organically learned two similar languages as child.
Both Low German (Platt) and Bavarian are classified as separate languages from Standard German in ISO 639-3, with language codes nds and bar, respectively (as opposed to deu). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3
That did sound interesting at first, but my native dialect Franconian [1] also has an ISO 639-3 language code (vmf) and while the pronounciation from high german differs, the words and grammar are basically identical (with very few exceptions). E.g. we pronounce "t" as "d" and "k" as "g" and some "g" as "ch", but the words remain the same. (This means I learned to pronouncations for every word as a child.) The ISO 639-3 seems to actively categorize dialects and not just "languages".
There has been an attempt to remove vmf from the standard (reason: such a language does not exist) in 2010, but it was rejected for formal reasons https://iso639-3.sil.org/request/2010-012
ISO 639-3 does aim to classify languages and not dialects, but that means the classification needs to change as the linguistic evidence is reinterpreted.
I tried reading some articles, and while it mostly feels like Standard German with fantasy spelling, there were some words I didn't understand, e.g. in the article about cows: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf/Kou
Ah, interesting that they tried to remove it. Edit: i just read the proposal to remove it and it was mainly, because vmf was classified as "mainfranconian" and "upperfranconian" spoken west of the city of Mainz. I agree with the proposal, it's nonsense. Mainz isn't part of the Franconian dialect region. It's basically Nürnberg and Würzburg areas and Mainz is west of Frankfurt (which speaks "hessisch" and is west of Würzburg). It's weird that the article about Franconian in Wikipedia links to the vmf language code. Looks like an error.
I guess the words you didn't understand are mostly due to absurd spelling to capture the pronouncuation and the use of colloquial words in Franconian dialect (high german jetzt -> colloquial etz -> Franconian etzadla). I had trouble reading it.
> A Kou (Anschbachisch: Kua, Hoaloisch: Kuâ) is a weiblichs Rind un a Väich as der Familie vo däi Honndräächer. Sie is a Nudzdier un a Milch- un Fleischlieferand. Der wilde Schdammvadder is der Aueroggs. Vor ungfähr 8000 Joahr hams a boarr vo denne eigfangd und an Menschn gweend. Däi Nachgummma davo sin edzadla unsre Käi.
High german (verbatim): Eine Kuh ist ein weibliches Rind und ein Vieh aus der Familie der Hornträger. Sie ist ein Nutztier und ein Milch- und Fleischlieferant. Der wilde Stammmvater ist der Auerochse. Vor ungefähr 8000 Jahren haben sie ein paar von denen eingefangen und an Menschen gewöhnt. Die Nachkommen davon sind jetzt unsere Kühe.
Regarding your fun fact: Same in parts of Switzerland where Swiss German is spoken. Swiss German is a variant of High Allemannic (with some exceptions where Highest Allemannic is spoken). We perceive German as a foreign language that is learned in school and most people are pretty bad at pronunciation (and sometimes at grammar, since some of the tenses and cases are missing in Swiss German.
We usually perceive Swiss German as a different language too and not just a dialect. We usually do learn High German before attending school tho, it's not as a foreign language in school.
I do remember an unfortunate situation during a summer camp in Croatia. I was sitting next to a very attractive girl from Switzerland and I was simply unable to have a conversation with her, because I couldn't understand at least half of what she was saying :(.
For a while in secondary school I was learning three languages at once - French, German and Irish (Gaelic). I'm Irish, native English speaker, in case it wasn't obvious.
In general I think it helped to learn them in parallel rather than in sequence. It made it easier to pick up the more fundamental grammatical/linguistic things.
I wouldn't do it outside of full time education though. It was a lot of work.
Learning languages in parallel is usually the right strategy.
The problem is that it not only takes hands-on time to build the mental infrastructure, but also calendar-time.
In general, if you learnt a certain Word X time ago, you have a good chance of forgetting it after X further time. There clearly is a distribution, but this general rule of thumb does generally hold. I know I could learn a few hundred words in a day to remember them the next day, if I really wanted to (using mnemonics). But they would fade within days, or weeks at the most.
I have been reading German novels on Kindle. If I don't understand a word, put my finger on it and in a few seconds I get a definition. Admittedly, only about 50% or the words I check are in the built-in dictionary, but it allows me to keep reading without too much time loss. What would be amazing is to automatically generate anki cards from this. Anyone?
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).
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.
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.
This is all explained very well in e introduction to the book, which IIRC you can read in the online preview.
Basically learning the meaning and writing of all characters first, then their pronunciation is faster than learning each character fully, one at a time. Experience bears this out.
Beyond the books mentioned elsewhere in this thread, for Japanese, I think the Japan Times published books tend to be good, e.g. Seiichi Makino's grammar dictionaries.
It's more app- and website-oriented, but the Tofugu website has quasi-monthly roundups of new Japanese learning tools.
I feel like Chinese - for a variety of reasons - doesn't have the same high level of pedagogical curation. But the Fuller book is good for learning classical, and Pleco is a great platform for dictionaries, flashcards, etc -- some paid, some free.
The Russian one is likely Reading Modern Russian by Jules F. Levin and Peter D. Haikalis, with A. A. Forostenko.
It is super interesting, as I want to learn to read Russian in order to learn more about the various languages of the region, many of which have only had monographs published in Russian. Now to see if I can find a used/cheap copy anywhere.
But it is a living language and not among the most difficult ones. Why not learn the whole language rather than a reading focus only? You don't have to learn to fluency.
Because of the effort involved. At least for me, learning how to read in a foreign language is far far easier than learning how to understand the spoken language and learning how to produce the spoken and written forms of the language.
So, I can either learn how to read, hear, speak, and write a a single language or I can expend the same effort and learn to read many languages. For me, the later is much more appealing. But then, I'm a voracious reader and too introverted to be interested in talking or writing to actual living people.
Because my main interest in Russian comes from wanting tk read grammars of other languages written only in Russian, as well as other Russian literature. Not much for interacting with others, though of course I'd likely improve that once I met my goals with reading.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Don't get me started about Crystalmark dumbed down English campaign. That's these folks: 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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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).
Neither does German. If you refer to the "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung", this is as the name implies just a transnational organisation from the German speaking countries to keep the orthography (somewhat) consistent.
Which is something that English is dearly missing. A consistent orthography actually helps language learners a lot. This is one of the few points where English sucks as a lingua franca.
If you think about the "Duden" dictionary, this is also not true. The Duden has always been a descriptive dictionary, not a normative one.
There is no organization in German on the level of the Académie française.
There are some small private clubs fighting for the "purity" of the language (which of course is ridiculous for a language with so many imported Latin/Greek/French and now English words) but nothing with enough authority to dictate the evolution of the living language.
There is also a huge (unsolved) gender issue with e.g. occupations. Every occupation has a male and female form and traditionally the male form is used to address a mixed group. English only has this in a few (easily fixed) cases like businessman => businessperson, policeman => police officer, otherwise they are gender neutral.
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.
I am losing my hearing and I have found that this effects my understanding of German, which I learned late in life, far more than English, my native language. In fact I'm convinced that many native speakers of German simply do not enunciate articles or adjective endings and native listeners simply subconsciously understand what they expect to hear because that's what is correct. Likewise I'm sure that native speakers of English do similar things but because it's all subconscious I can't give exact examples.
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).
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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!
> how concepts in German/Spanish map to their English equivalents.
Yeah, if it has comparative grammar it's not that much surprising.
From the context of the paragraph I was assuming this would be a volume purely about English grammar. Since it's aimed at native speakers that already know the grammar of their own language, this would be an advanced text, for students looking to improve their knowledge of English architecture itself. And somehow improve this advanced knowledge in ways that are not generic, but specific to the fact that they are simultaneously learning X or Y language...
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.
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.
When I played this for the first time, it took me a while to figure out why their lips weren't agreeing with what they were saying. By default Netflix played the English dub for me instead of German audio with English subtitles.
The subject matter of Dark is good enough that I would watch it anyway, but if it's originally in German? Huge bonus. I have been watching it on German audio with "description" in German (so there's a narrator talking about things people are doing, describing their facial expressions, etc) and English subtitles. I wish there were more content like this available in the States.
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.
Hmm, actually a lot of the memes there are parodies of the English ones you find on Reddit. Just saying that a lot of them are almost nonsensical to someone not familiar with Reddit's English language meme culture.
That's probably a bad idea, r/de delights in literal translations of English expressions and memes. Many comments are completely incomprehensible to outsiders. It's a parody on the English-speaking parts of reddit and not a good place to learn German. Not unless you can distinguish when they're butchering the language for fun from when it's actual colloquial German.
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)?
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.
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).
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.
Duolingo is really really bad at teaching you anything remotely useful. It tried it for both languages I know (Japanese, French) and another I don't know (Czech) and in both case the experience was terrible. It's basically just quizzes with no lesson on grammar whatsoever. Sentences are taken from corpora so they sometimes are really unnatural. Speech is TTS. It's a beautifully designed glorified vocabulary app that has low educational value.
The mobile apps don't have grammar, but the web site does, for most skills in most languages. Also, grammar is easy to get from other sites.
The sentences are not taken from corpora, but edited by Humans, mostly volunteers. The courses are improved using user data. Some of the courses are indeed not the best quality.
If TTS is used (many courses use natural speakers), it was OK for me, so far.
Duolingo isn't perfect but I think it's the most efficient way to learn a new language from nothing up to a certain level (A2, maybe B1). If used correctly. You need to decide yourself how much time you spend on repetition vs progress. And yes, you probably need something else for full grammar explanation or Chinese/Japanese Characters. Though they are reportedly working on better Character exercises.
> The mobile apps don't have grammar, but the web site does, for most skills in most languages.
Ok, I’ve never been far enough on their website to see it (I mostly test the mobile app). I’ll check it soon.
> Also, grammar is easy to get from other sites.
Which defeat using Duolingo in the first place. And no, some language have quite complicated grammar (Czech, Turkish, Finnish for instance) and somewhat lacking in ressources if your native language isn’t English.
You won't be learning a language from a single source ever. Duolingo is the most efficient for what it does, including teaching grammar, actually.
Yes, it might help to have a more organized grammar reference, but Duolingo does make you practice grammar quite efficiently in my experience.
For those complaining about Duolingo: Are there better routes? The convenience of the app, integrating audio, grammar and vocabulary are really hard to beat in terms of learning efficiency, even if you might have an in-person course.
My personal recommendation would be Memrise's third party 5000 word deck for vocabulary, and something like this course or a tutor for grammar.
I used Duolingo for a month when starting out and consider it a mistake. It doesn't teach grammar, vocabulary goes faster when you space repitition individual words, and even after the full tree is unlocked there isn't really that much depth.
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.
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.
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.
Listening comprehension is the toughest part for virtually everyone.
Forming sentences gets easier once you make the switch from translating sentences into composing them without the intermediate step. That's also possible when translating in Duolingo, you just have to concentrate on formulating the idea in the foreign language.
I made that switch in English first, and I seem to do it by default in any other language. It's much easier that way.
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:
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.
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-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.