A foundation course in reading German

https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/

by romes • 7 years ago

327 156 7 years ago

courses.dcs.wisc.edu

irrational2• 7 years 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).

Gravityloss3• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Newspapers and literature are quite distinct. Good authors do not require the smokescreen that typical journalists use. Whatever the language.

Swizec• 7 years ago

If you have nothing to say, you make it complicated to fill space.

You see this in English, too.

LeonidasXIV4• 7 years 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.

leipert3• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

English language literature has had [...] Orson Welles

?????

Orson Welles was a movie director. Did you misspell Oscar Wilde?

symplee• 7 years ago

(removed - since this reply was for a different comment)

yorwba4• 7 years ago

Alternatively, for human-translated sentences (some with audio) check out https://tatoeba.org

melling• 7 years 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

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.

FabHK3• 7 years 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.

HuShifang3• 7 years 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.

garmaine3• 7 years 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.

dorchadas5• 7 years ago

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.

Razengan• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

It's also literally like exploring entirely new words.

wrp• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

HuShifang3• 7 years 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.

dorchadas5• 7 years 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• 7 years 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!

ggambetta6• 7 years 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 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• 7 years ago

Out of curiosity, how do you find learning two languages at once?

ggambetta6• 7 years 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.

ploika• 7 years ago

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.

bayesian_horse11• 7 years ago

At the moment I am working on 5 languages, though with varying effort.

romes5• 7 years ago

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!

ggambetta6• 7 years ago

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?

dorchadas5• 7 years ago

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.

rwnspace• 7 years ago

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.

LeonidasXIV4• 7 years ago

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).

FabHK3• 7 years ago

This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second.

As the introduction states, the book assumes that the student works with a dictionary. So, it explicitly does not address vocabulary.

superplussed• 7 years ago

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

MobileVet• 7 years ago

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.

amedvednikov• 7 years ago

Great website! Much better than memrise and duo.

ggambetta6• 7 years ago

I'll check it out! The frequency list sounds like a very valuable thing.

mistahenry• 7 years ago

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 ____.

CHsurfer• 7 years ago

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?

odiroot• 7 years ago

From my own experience learning German for 8 years, I have to say grammar is absolutely the biggest challenge.

Vocabulary is easy to learn by consuming a lot of media.

Finally pronunciation may be the next hurdle, especially if you're not used to germanic languages.

lucb1e2• 7 years 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

Add-on that I used: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-toggler/

pbhjpbhj2• 7 years ago

"reader mode" works too (eg in Firefox).

lucb1e2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

romes5• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Don't forget r/de on Reddit

leipert3• 7 years ago

Native German speaker here. Other recommendations (I learned English this way):

- Watch movies / TV series with (German) subtitles. Recommendations: Dubbed stuff that is easy to digest like e.g. Crime Stuff / Big Bang Theory.

- Or more advanced, German productions: Dark on Netflix; Babylon Berlin; Bad Banks; Stromberg (The Office clone); Tatortreiniger; Tatort.

- Read books like that you might know in your native language: the Little Prince, Harry Potter.

FabHK3• 7 years ago

This is not a course for learning German, but for learning how to read and understand written German with the help of a dictionary.

Tomte• 7 years 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.

pbhjpbhj2• 7 years 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?

yorwba4• 7 years ago

Have you tried searching for "interlinear translations"? Got plenty of Bible translations, but also https://interlinearbooks.com/

gandalfian• 7 years ago

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

romes5• 7 years ago

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

Koshkin• 7 years 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.

jobigoud3• 7 years ago

Maybe it's because when you meet non-native speakers that don't have an accent you don't know it.

tehabe• 7 years 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).

LeonidasXIV4• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Disagree, German is my native tongue but I think it's overly complex. Has the advantage of being more phonetic than English, though.

wenc2• 7 years 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).

bhaak2• 7 years ago

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.

tobias3• 7 years ago

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.

kazga• 7 years ago

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

Even the most fluent non-native German speakers I know still mix up genders and adjective endings every second sentence, at least in speaking.

Quequau3• 7 years ago

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.

jobigoud3• 7 years 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?

LeonidasXIV4• 7 years 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.

leipert3• 7 years 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• 7 years 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!

jobigoud3• 7 years ago

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...

tom_mellior4• 7 years 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/: "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.

molticrystal• 7 years 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_mellior4• 7 years 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-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.

vanusa• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm being too pedantic,

Nichts der Art.

"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.

ofrzeta• 7 years ago

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.

tom_mellior4• 7 years ago

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.

umanwizard• 7 years ago

Similarly, in French, “le cation”.

But I still think it’d be fine to teach beginners that nouns ending in -tion are “always” feminine.

tom_mellior4• 7 years ago

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.

bald• 7 years ago

On the same page: "All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are feminine."

I would hazard the guess that, in this explanation, the author refers to syllables and not just a combination of letters.

The counter-examples you gave all end in syllables different from those mentioned by the author:

der Brei - one syllable / das Aller-lei / das Ben-zin

filmor• 7 years ago

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.

_Codemonkeyism3• 7 years ago

Additionally in different parts of Germany the gender of many nouns is different.

tasogare5• 7 years ago

Interesting fact, can you give an example or two?

kayoone• 7 years ago

I am a native speaker but can't think of any, care to give an example?

dawg-• 7 years ago

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.

snambi• 7 years ago

interesting.. what is the value in learning German?

unethical_ban• 7 years 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.

vonnik• 7 years 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

bayesian_horse11• 7 years 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.

misja2• 7 years 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_horse11• 7 years 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.

reitzensteinm• 7 years ago

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.

tasogare5• 7 years ago

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.

bayesian_horse11• 7 years ago

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.

A foundation course in reading German

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