A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

Offline Textbook | A Foundation Course in Reading German
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/print-entire-textbook/
Page 2 of 151
12/8/2017
English Grammar for Students of German, by Cecile Zorach, Charlotte Melin,
and Adam Oberlin, Olivia and Hill Press (any edition).
2. You will also need access to a comprehensive, full-sized German-English
dictionary to succeed with this material. Students in University of Wisconsin
German 391 typically need a dictionary equivalent to the Oxford-Duden
German Dictionary, which weighs in at over 5 pounds with over 1,700 full-size
pages.
This open textbook was launched publicly on 22 October 2014 and is revised
continually. You are permitted to adapt this work, titled A Foundation Course in
Reading German, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This original work should be attributed to
"Howard Martin, revised by Alan Ng."
Howard Martin's "Preface" to the last print edition, 2001
This book’s third edition is a field-tested manual designed to give individuals, no
matter what their field of interest, the basic tools and knowledge to read German. It
does not pretend to cover all of the rules of German grammar and syntax nor to
address in detail exceptions to those rules. Rather it focuses on the essential
elements of grammar, syntax and word formation drawing on similarities to and
differences from English. With this focus, it aims to enable individuals to read and
translate materials related to their interests with the aid of a dictionary or
dictionaries in specialized fields. The material in this manual is suitable for use in
distance learning courses. The format of the book owes much to the late Hubert
Jannach’s (Professor Emeritus, Purdue University) book, German for Reading
Knowledge, which I used for many years to teach graduate students from
humanities, social studies, and natural sciences departments. Its style, I believe, is
my peculiar own. The motivation to write it came from my students and particularly
from Professors Lester Seifert and Richard Ringler who stimulated my interest in
investigating the many similarities between English and the other Germanic
languages. Further, I owe much to Carol Crary and Kris Falk, who typed, retyped
and formatted the first edition. My thanks go to former graduate students
Friedemann Weidauer and Sue Tyson for developing many of the exercises, to the
latter for her field testing and editing the second edition, and more recently to
graduate students Hope Hague, for her suggestions, and Alan Ng, for incorporating
them in this third edition. Last but not least, my thanks go to my wife, Cathie, who
sacrificed much to enable me to continue my schooling.
Unit: Introduction