German, anyone?

I confess that I enjoy languages, and I’ve always had a had an interest in German because my dad spent time in Germany in the air force and always had a German grammar on a bookshelf while I was growing up. So, learning German wasn’t a task that I found oppressive. That said, I find that it is harder and harder to convince students that the effort is worth the payoff, and I see that more and more PhD theses are engaging German less and less. So is German worth it?

I found it to be so in the last week or so, and so I thought I’d pass along the experience. Chris Eberhart, Matthias Henze, and a couple of others hosted a conference on covenant here in Houston just before SBL. Through the various sponsors, it turned out that about 90% of the conference presenters were German. Of course, they conceded to the current winds  by presenting in English, but some discussion naturally occurred in German. So without facility in German, I’d have been lost. It turns out too that instructions about presenting in English didn’t make it around to all (or were not heeded?), and one of the presentations was in German. Though my listening is not attuned as my reading, I was able to keep up because I still make an effort to keep it fresh. While this example isn’t a common occurrence, this facility allows me to participate at a level not otherwise accessible.

More to the substance of the issue, different types of conversations go on within different language groups. For instance, when I was working on glory in Romans, I found that there was a discussion that took place almost singularly among German-language scholarship about the relationship of glory and righteousness. Of course, you don’t know that that discussion is there unless you have access to it through language facility.

Perhaps in another decade or two English will so dominate that facility in modern research languages will go by the wayside among NT scholars. But until then I’m holding up the banner.

In case you wonder how I keep up my German: I regularly read German novels on a Kindle with the dictionary set to a German-English dictionary so I can click on a word on the fly and get the translation. I don’t look up everything since my focus is more the story, but it keeps me in it regularly.

 

Open Access German Textbook

One of the great aspects of the internet is the access to books that are no longer under copyright, but they are of course by nature very old. Over the past several years I’ve started to hear more and more about contemporary open access (text)books that are coming available. Some are written primarily as open access online, such as Nijay Gupta’s Intermediate Biblical Greek Reader: Galatians and Related Texts. Others, however, are conversions of print books that have been released or edited for an online setting.

That appears to be the basis of this open access German textbook: A Foundation Course in Reading German, by Howard Martin, revised and expanded as an open online textbook by Alan Ng. The descriptor notes “This open textbook is currently maintained by Dr. Alan Ng and Dr. Sarah Korpi to support the University of Wisconsin online course German 391.”

After poking through it, I found the explanations clear and the examples helpful. Let me give an example: One thing that I have struggled to find with textbooks is a good introduction to “lassen” since it can communicate various things. While short and (appropriately) to the point, this lays things out clearly: https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/verbs-function-like-modals/

Hopefully those studying will find it helpful.