Learning to Read German is Like Learning to Cook– Part Two

If you know your ingredients and know how they are put together you can make a good meal. If you have the vocabulary and the grammar rules of sentences you can already write a sentence — as we saw in part one of this article.

But that is not enough if you want subtlety, in writing German as well as in making a delicious meal.

Sentence structure and vocabulary can be learned almost like a computer — logically! Where it gets stickier is when the understanding depends on idiomatic, slang, or dialect expressions which only make sense in context and cannot be translated in a straightforward manner. With an insightful cultural background and context, you can read between the lines to be able to convey the meaning that is not explicitly on the page.

Let’s take a look at an example of a culturally loaded sentence:

Der Feuchtwanger und seine Spezis, die sich vor 1933 regelmässig jeden Dienstag im Paulaner-Garten trafen, tranken normalerweise eine Mass, was er dann später im Exil vermisste. Feuchtwanger and his pals, who met regularly before 1933 every Tuesday in the Paulaner Garden, drank normally one liter of beer, which he later missed while in exile.

How is that sentence culturally loaded?

In order to fully understand the meaning of this sentence while reading between the lines, it is necessary to have some background knowledge of the culture. Let’s take a look:

· Paulaner is a synonym for beer because it is the name of a brewery and thus a beer brand.

· Every brewery in Munich has its own beer garden.

· “Eine Mass” is a special one-liter glass for beer in Bavaria.

· “Spezis” is Bavarian dialect for “pals”.

· 1933 was the year the Nazis came to power. Jews, communists, and enemies of the Nazi regime were persecuted and forced to flee Germany in order to survive.

To go one step further in even better understanding the sentence, you should be familiar with the name Lion Feuchtwanger. He was a leftist German writer from Munich who had written a book about the evils of the Nazis before their rise to power in1933. When he was later exiled to France and then to the USA, where there are hardly any beer gardens and you cannot get a “Mass”, and a Paulaner beer certainly wasn’t available, he most likely would have missed that.

By learning the culture, we can learn to read German whereas computer translations fall short. Let’s take a look at Google’s and DeepL’s translations of our example sentence.

Google translates the dialect expression “seine Spezis” with “his companion”, which is an approximation of the real meaning “his pals” and changes its original plural to singular. It also translates “eine Mass”(=a one-liter-glass-of-beer) with “a mass”, which doesn’t make sense at all:

Feuchtwanger and his companion, who before 1933 met regularly every Tuesday in the Paulaner Garden, usually drank a mass, which he later missed in exile.

DeepL Software uses a different approach. DeepL doesn’t translate the words it doesn’t understand. Instead, it takes the German words “Mass” and “spezis” and leaves them as “Mass” or turns it into a not-existing-word “speciallists”: “The Feuchtwanger and his speciallists, who before 1933 met regularly every Tuesday in the Paulaner garden, usually drank a Mass, which he later missed in exile.”

There are many approaches one can take while learning to read German.

Some students may enjoy the straightforward rote-learning method of building a vocabulary. Others may approach the language like an engineer, looking at the logic of the structure. In my opinion, the most fun aspect of learning German is by studying the more complex cultural aspects of the language.

I hope this shows how you can systematically learn German and thereby easily surpass a computer translation through a steady approach.

Or in other words….

Let me bring you back to my initial analogy that learning to read German is like learning to cook. On the one hand, you can enjoy smelling the herbs, going to the market, reading recipes, looking at photos of yummy dishes, watch entertaining cooking shows, and having fun immersing yourself in the world of delicious dishes. Or on the other hand, you can first follow simple recipes and then move towards more complicated ones depending on what suits you best.

Regardless of which approach you take to cooking and learning German, you will eventually learn to do both.

Guten Appetit!!

Enjoy!

*Fun fact: For pretzel, it is hard to not say “Brezen” as a Münchner. J

** I wanted another “proof” for the skeptics of that statement, and low-and-behold I found this fun article: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/most-logical-language/