Learning to Read German is Like Learning to Cook — Part One
You have to know your ingredients and know how they are put together to make a good meal. If you are familiar with the subtleties and nuances of a culture, you can make a delicious meal. Similarly, when reading German text, you go through a comparable, but inverse process. This metaphor lacks a bit in that when I cook, I’m putting ingredients together to create something, whereas when I read German, I already have something that’s put together that I take apart. Let’s look at the following analogies:
1. You not only need to have your ingredients, but you really need to know your ingredients.
2. You have to know how flavors change in combination with other ingredients/words and in other combinations/structures. In other words, how do the elements react with each other? Let’s first take a look at a cooking example using salt. At first glance, salt simply makes most foods salty. But we can then look at how salt can have more sophisticated reactions such as how it can sweeten certain foods like a radish. In the case of German, ‘doch,’ usually means ‘but yes, it is’. But other meanings are possible, depending on the other ingredients. Sometimes, ‘doch’ will mean “after all.”
3. You have to know which steps are taken in a recipe and how long you need in order to properly cook a dish. In cooking, the chronology and time expressions are straightforward. When reading German, you have to know that time expressions are also needed in conjunction with the verb to provide context to the reader. In German, because there are fewer tenses than in English, the addition of a time expression is sometimes needed for the reader to understand when something is taking place.
Reading as well as cooking is a basic life skill, but there are many different ways in which you can slowly hone your skill. Practice makes perfect.
So, let’s have a look at some elements for learning to read German.
· Logic & Structure
· Vocabulary
· Culture/Context.
Logic & Structure
I thought of the analogy between cooking and German-reading while pondering information about the former practice in American schools of diagramming sentences.
The sentence diagrams reminded me both of the step-by-step photo instructions of popular cookbooks and similarly, of how sentences are deconstructed in Latin and German. The basic idea for both approaches is to analyze sentences based on various components and what kinds of information these components are telling us. — Who or what, is doing what to whom, with what?
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However, some differences also popped into my mind:
1. German (and Latin, too) is structurally more predictable than English.**
2. There is so much more to understanding a sentence than the sum of it words and structure, such as context and culture.
3. It is important to have a good vocabulary and an understanding of grammatical structures. I am convinced that if you learn the rules of the German language (grammar) and have a basic vocabulary, you can decipher most German sentences systematically. Let me illustrate:
See if you can logically decode these sentences — note that there are lots of cognates.
Der Mann trinkt ein Glas Bier.
Der Mann sitzt im Garten.
Der Mann, der im Garten sitzt, trinkt ein Glas Bier.
Der Mann und die Frau, die im Garten sitzen, trinken je ein Glas Bier.
Das Kind trinkt Milch.
You can probably understand these sentences without knowing a single word of German because the words are cognates for an English-speaking person.
As you can see, certain patterns actually apply to all German sentences. By understanding the grammatical structures and rules, you will have learned in large part how to decipher and decode German sentences.
Let’s take a look at sentence structure — follow the logic
What do you think of the two sentences below which one is the main — a. or b. ? (Correct Answer: ‘a’).
Notice the placement of the components in the main sentence.
a. Der Mann trinkt ein Glas Bier.
b. der im Garten sitzt.?
Which sentence below is the relative sentence? (Correct Answer: ‘b’).
The relative sentence is dependent on the main sentence and provides additional information.
a. Der Mann und die Frau trinken je ein Glas Bier.
b. die im Garten sitzen
In which position is the main verb — the verb of the main sentence? (Answer ‘a’) And where is the verb in the relative sentence? (Answer ‘b’) Observe that the verb placement is different for main and relative sentences.
a. It’s the second element of the sentence. (trinkt/trinken)
b. It’s the last element of the sentence. (sitzt/sitzen)
So, without having any translation you could figure out the sentence structure of a German sentence if you know these simple rules. More rules will become apparent as you are exposed to more of the German language.
In the following sentences you can see that two nouns form one new noun. For example, “das Bier” and “der Garten” becomes “der Biergarten”.
Learning the vocabulary:
Of course, not all words will be cognates or guessable by context. For example, in the following sentences, ‘je’ means ‘each’ and ‘aber’ means ‘but’. In these instances, you will just have to commit the vocabulary words to memory. There really is no way around building a good working vocabulary.
Der Mann und die Frau, die im Garten sitzen, trinken je ein Glas Bier, aber das Kind trinkt Milch.
Der Mann und die Frau, die im Garten sitzen, trinken je ein Glas Bier, aber das Kind trinkt Milch oder Wasser.
Der Mann und die Frau, die im Biergarten sitzen, trinken je ein Glas Bier, aber das Kind trinkt Milch oder Wasser oder es isst eine Brezel.*
The man and the woman, who sit in the beer garden, each drink a glass of beer, but the child drinks milk or water or eats a pretzel.
Sentence structure and vocabulary can be learned almost like a computer — logically! Where it gets stickier is when understanding depends on idiomatic language, slang, or dialect that only makes sense in context and cannot be translated in a straightforward manner. With insight into the cultural context, you can read between the lines and discern meaning not explicitly on the page. So, so far we can make a reasonably fair meal, but without the culture component, they stay relatively simple.
