More About German For Reading

January 22, 2012 Leave a comment

As stated in an earlier post, German for Reading by Karl C. Sandberg and John R. Wendel is an excellent book for improving your literary knowledge of German.  In many respects, the first chapter is the most important one since it deals with recognizing cognates, which are plentiful in German.  Be sure you study this chapter carefully as it will save you much dictionary use in the future.  The limitation of this book is that there are no excerpts from German newspapers or magazines, which employ a different kind of German than one finds in literary passages.  I recommend to the authors(assuming they are considering another edition) that they include excerpts from Der Spiegel, and German newspapers to better prepare the reader.

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If You Study German, You Better Love Commas

November 13, 2011 2 Comments

If you study German, you better love commas.  Forget the other unimportant punctuation marks such as periods, question marks, exclamation marks, semicolons, and colons.  Focus on commas, your deepest love.  Only then will you truly grasp the nature of clauses.  And, most importantly, you will be on your way to finding the mysterious verb and subject.  German is a kind of puzzle.  Perhaps that’s why the Germans produced so many great philosophers.  It’s a language that abounds in tricks and words that have many meanings dependent on their context or function in the sentence.  Ganz abgesehen, German can be great fun to read.  Get a hold of German for Reading by Sandberg and Wendel, and in 6-8 months you will read German fluently.  This wonderful text contains actual excerpts from the writings of:  Freud, Jung, Jaspers, Engels, and Schweitzer, among others.  Good luck!

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