Tag Archives: German language

German reading resources

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On my long to-do list is to not only write the Gnomeville beginner French comics, but to also write a series in German and another in Dutch, both for which I have some preliminary drafts. Meanwhile, I have found an excellent beginner comic in German by Janine Wolf-Schindler. The illustrations are crude but effective, the language simple, and there are translations discreetly placed at the bottom of the page. This is now my recommended first read in German. That may change when I find (or write) other resources, but it is a good start.

Learn German with a Comic. John in Berlin by Janine Wolf-Schindler.

I’ve yet to think about where this comic fits in the sequence of reading difficulty of available texts in German. There are ELI and La Spiga texts that are easy. After that there are teen readers, and various krimis. I’ll leave that analysis and discussion for another day.

 

 

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Two Great Language Acquisition Resources

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German Extensive Reading Stories

I’ve recently been reading the ebooks by André Klein. He provides a collection of reading material in authentic German for beginners and intermediate learners, with comprehensive glosses of expressions used in the stories.

I have now finished reading the first four in his Dino lernt Deutsch series for beginners. I think they are a fantastic resource for German learners. Now, as a caveat, I must say that I’m a false beginner for German, since my Dutch background makes German pretty easy to understand, so how it reads for someone of purely English-speaking background or other language backgrounds I can’t comment.

Each book consists of ten short stories, but all follow the adventures of Dino, as he lives in and travels through Germany. I’m guessing the format is as it is, so that when commencing reading, the learner can feel that they have achieved something by reading one short story.

The stories are not greatly dumbed down, in that there are smatterings of dialect (also translated), which somewhat increase the load on the learner. As I’m generally interested in language, I find this quite interesting. However, it may make the stories somewhat more challenging for the beginner.

He also has a couple of picture story books. These have little text and the language is not necessarily easier in terms of vocabulary load and grammar. They are, however, pleasant reads. I think the language is somewhat more constrained in the Dino series, so they are probably more useful for extensive reading.

André Klein’s books are found on Amazon, Smashwords and elsewhere. He also has more language resources on his website.

French Listening Resources

I’ve been floating around some Facebook groups about languages lately. One provided a link to the series Extra French. I hadn’t come across this before, but for me it is entertaining, in sit com format, and simple enough to follow. It’s probably a good place to start for listening practice, other than the practice of listening to stories while following the written text.

Another resource I’ve heard about recently is related to specific CEFR levels. Find French oral comprehension activities there. Good practice for those wanting to sit DELF/DALF exams.

Constrained Writing

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In 1996 I first heard about a book written without the letter E (Gadsby, by Wright, published 1939). Then a couple of years later I met a French colleague and was telling him about my comic book in French that exclusively uses French-English cognates and one new French word per page. It reminded him of constrained writing, particularly “lipograms”, and he introduced me to the work of Georges Perec, who wrote various works with or without certain vowels. We exchanged DNA poetry. More recently I dabbled in pilish, adding the constraint of writing in haiku verses.

A recent blog post about OULIPO reminded me about my fascination with such things.

The experience of writing my comic in French is quite different to my dabblings in German and Dutch, due to the differences in cognates (similar looking words with similar meaning) in the different languages.  In French it is hard to generate much text initially, but there is soon an abundance of identically spelt nouns, adjectives and verbs (albeit with slightly different endings).  In Dutch and to a lesser extent in German it is possible to write 20-odd words of meaningful text entirely using exact cognates.  But eventually you hit a wall where there are not many verbs to work with.  I’m still figuring out how to get past that wall before I commit to drawing the (publishable) artwork for and publishing a first episode in those languages.

 

Green Eggs and Ham

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Continuing my articles on easy readers, today’s post is dedicated to Dr Seuss.  His first constrained vocabulary book was The Cat in the Hat, which was released in 1957.  It had a vocabulary of 236 words (though other sources state slightly different numbers) , and yet was entertaining.  Dr Seuss then went on to write other books with a reduced vocabulary, including Green Eggs and Ham, which has only 50 different words.  Wikipedia lists the words used as: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

These books are truly brilliant, in that they make children want to keep reading, while being easy for them to read.  A 50 word vocabulary is an amazing achievement.

Green Eggs and Ham has been translated into many languages.  We have a copy in Italian: “Prosciutto e uova verdi”.  However, once translated, the number of distinct words increased to about 127.  A translator has to somehow convey the original story as well as the rhyme and rhythm.  I’m not sure if the translator considered the goal of using the smallest vocabulary possible, as 127 for a text length of 620 words seems quite high.

I’m reminded of a section in the book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid” by Douglas Hofstadter, which looks at German and French translations of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky poem.  The original has many made-up words that hint at meanings due to their phonetic similarity to other words.  For example “slithy” hints at “slimy” and “slither”, among other words.  It is translated to “lubricilleux” in the French and “schlichten” in the German version.  Combining made-up words with rhyme and meter makes it a very difficult translation challenge.

But back to easy readers.  While it may be useful to translate an easy reader to another language – particularly when they are as entertaining as those of Dr Seuss –  I think the best work can be achieved by exploiting the quirks of the original language.  Design your easy reader for your specific target language.