Monday, June 13, 2005
(7:28 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Learning German
Today, after a marathon session, I finished the German book I've been using, which you can easily buy using the following link if you wish me to get a cut:The cover appears to have changed since I bought it, so maybe it's a new edition. It is perhaps a little expensive, but it is a very good language instruction book. April Wilson pays special attention to the kinds of mistakes that are most likely to trip you up -- for instance, the ending to masculine and neuter nouns in the genetive singular is -s, and she emphasizes in bold italics that this is not plural. It doesn't have answers to every single exercise, but it always seemed to have the answer for the ones that were most difficult for me. My way of using this book on my own was that for each lesson, I did the following:
- I read through the explanations of the grammar, taking notes
- for every chart of verb conjugations or noun/adjective declensions, I copied the chart over three or four times. This was especially helpful in solidifying the noun cases. (In my French class, we did a lot of work fully conjugating verbs, but verbs are a lot easier in German than in French, so hopefully I won't be hampered by not having done as much work with that.)
- I wrote out the answers to every exercise (this is important).
- I read through the vocab lists every time and wrote out the words and definitions that the author had starred as "words to memorize eventually."
- For the "vocab memory" exercises (further sentences that you're supposed to memorize to help you with the vocab in context), I translated them, checked them, then wrote them each out several times in German.
- For reading passages, I did not write them all out, because in some cases that would have been extremely time-consuming. After every paragraph or so that I had read, I would flip back to see if it was included in the answer key, to make sure I was doing it right.
My next step is going to be to work my way through a couple readers I have on hand, which I might supplement with another grammar book that Anthony has lying around. (Going through the grammar twice in rapid succession seems to have helped a lot with the French.)
And as always, if you want to learn to read French, I can't recommend this book highly enough:
I have too many language instruction books in my house. If anyone has anything to recommend in Latin or Greek, I'd be interested to add to my stock, though, even if I probably won't get to them for a long time.
