A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

Offline Textbook | A Foundation Course in Reading German
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12/8/2017
1. Introduction
Objectives
As you work through this textbook you will:
Gain enough grammatical and syntactical information about the German
language to enable you to read any desired text with the aid of a dictionary.
Apply patterns of word formation to accelerate the process of learning
vocabulary.
Practice small-scale translation as the necessary foundation for dealing with
more complex readings.
Relationship between German and English
Both of these languages belong to the Germanic family of languages. They share an
evolutionary origin and have many common features, although just like their
relatives Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish, they have since diverged in
various ways.
These examples show how close the vocabulary relationship can be:
Eng. sing, Dutch zingen, Ger. singen, Dan. synge, Sw. sjunga
Eng. broad, Dutch breed, Ger. breit, Dan. bred, Sw. bred, Nor. breid
You can see that some vocabulary will be easy to learn. The syntactical
differences between modern German and modern English will be more challenging,
and they will occupy us for most of this textbook.
Learning Vocabulary
For some individuals, this is perhaps the most difficult of tasks, and it is one that
many perceive as particularly difficult with German. The following points are made
to counter that perception:
Like English, German borrows words from other languages, and often either
from the same source that English does, or directly from English:
Auto, Hotel, Manager, Orange, Handling
There are many easily recognizable words, called cognates, such as: