best way to learn to read German (grade, profession, grammar)

[Angorlee]

any advice on this? I don't plan on going to Germany in the near future so I don't need the spoken part of learning German but I would like to read German. I tried a German to English dictionary but it doesn't cover it as instruction and that makes it diffecult.

[irman]

Originally Posted by Angorlee

any advice on this? I don't plan on going to Germany in the near future so I don't need the spoken part of learning German but I would like to read German. I tried a German to English dictionary but it doesn't cover it as instruction and that makes it diffecult.

In order to read AND understand German, you need two things.
A *vocabulary* of at least 500 commonly known words, although 1000 would be better. Then you have to know what each of those words mean.
I used to have a resource for that, but no idea now, who even publishes such a list !!

When you then read anything, it might not make sense to you (you did not study German Grammar which often is completely different than English Grammar) but at least you may get the gist of it ...

When we lived in Germany, I was often asked in Church to do simultaneous translation into English, for the English speaking guests we often had. The hardest part was that you have to wait until the sentence ends, in order to properly formulate the sentence in English, by the time the speaker already finishes his subsequent sentence ...
With that in mind, we got really good in *making up stories...*
If you are a regular Church-Goer, then it is easy to condense whatever the speaker is talking about.
Never got good enough to do it professionally !

Needless to say, I was always really exhausted at the end of the service ...
So, using a vocabulary/dictionary to translate the words you read, word for word, might not make sense at all since the verbs are conjugated, and those words are often hard to translate into English !

[Mark_22]

Originally Posted by Angorlee

any advice on this? I don't plan on going to Germany in the near future so I don't need the spoken part of learning German but I would like to read German. I tried a German to English dictionary but it doesn't cover it as instruction and that makes it diffecult.

I've had some success becoming more comfortable with written German by reading the bild.de tabloid. It's the kind of garbage I would never bother with in a million years if it were written in English. But for some reason articles about trashy celebrities and sensational news stories written at a third grade level seem to make it easy to follow along. Warning - due to a "European" attitude on nudity, don't open at work.

[lhpartridge]

There's a very useful website called WordChamp. They have a service called Web Reader which will let you read pages in different languages. I've only used it for French and Spanish, but you could try the German service.

[cpg35223]

Originally Posted by irman

In order to read AND understand German, you need two things.
A *vocabulary* of at least 500 commonly known words, although 1000 would be better. Then you have to know what each of those words mean.
I used to have a resource for that, but no idea now, who even publishes such a list !!

When you then read anything, it might not make sense to you (you did not study German Grammar which often is completely different than English Grammar) but at least you may get the gist of it ...

When we lived in Germany, I was often asked in Church to do simultaneous translation into English, for the English speaking guests we often had. The hardest part was that you have to wait until the sentence ends, in order to properly formulate the sentence in English, by the time the speaker already finishes his subsequent sentence ...
With that in mind, we got really good in *making up stories...*
If you are a regular Church-Goer, then it is easy to condense whatever the speaker is talking about.
Never got good enough to do it professionally !

Needless to say, I was always really exhausted at the end of the service ...
So, using a vocabulary/dictionary to translate the words you read, word for word, might not make sense at all since the verbs are conjugated, and those words are often hard to translate into English !

One of my favorite quotes by Mark Twain:

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.