Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
3people
2020–2025years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I understand both your historical question and the more concrete practical one. Separating reading comprehension as a skill from all the other discrete functions of a language is very straight-forward [1] and, in fact, there are some good analog resources for this.
For French: Dandberg and Tatham, French for Reading
For German: Jannach, German for Reading Knowledge
I've used both and swear they're magic, especially if you're trying to learn to read in a scientific domain that you're already a specialist in (versus literature).
Once you've sort of "learned the game" it isn't very hard to do a similar process for other languages on your own. Then, my main recommendation is to take a text you're deeply familiar with in your native language or English that exists in X other language and just go ahead and start reading it with a dictionary. It starts slow, but progress is very very fast if you stick with it, especially compared to learning to speak or even just listen to a language.
For life reasons, I've found myself having to learn Danish, so I'll let you know if I figure out any good resources for Scandinavian languages.
[1] The only downside I've encountered is trying to later learn to speak a language I had been reading for a while where overcoming the sort of "fictitious phonetics" that existed in my head proved problematic.
- I learned to read German by working through "German for Reading" by Karl Sandberg. It's a great book. Work through it a couple times until the grammar is second nature, use the Anki deck "4000 German words by frequency" to increase your vocabulary, and start reading children's books (Emil und die Detektive, Max und Moritz, u.s.w) then move onto slightly harder books like Kafka's Die Verwandlung and Zweig's Schachnovelle.
Max und Moritz is hilarious btw, so don't skip it!
- If you only want to learn to read German, check out a book called "German For Reading" by Karl Sandberg. I'm using it now and it's pretty good.
- I learnt Latin with LLPSI 1. Though I must admit, LLPSI wasn't the only resource I used. I had to use latintutorial's* youtube videos (his videos are great btw) to explain certain bits of grammar that I couldn't understand on my own, like gerunds, gerundives and the subjunctive mood with `ut' and `cum' clauses is what I needed help with specifically, so you're right about people only getting the basics or at least the things they can make sense of on their own. I suppose LLPSI would be easier for someone who has already taught themselves an Indo-European language and is used to Indo-European grammar. Latin, for me, was the first language I learned, so I had jumped into the deep end. "Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar" is another book I used occasionally (it's the best Latin grammar book IMO). As for your comment on feedback, if I can understand what I'm reading then that's all I'm interested in. I'm only learning Latin to read ancient Latin literature. I don't want to compose or translate Latin. An example of feedback for me, would be to read a page of Caesar's The Gallic War in Latin then read the same page in English afterwards to see how close I was to understanding everything. So far I've been close on almost everything, so the feedback I'm getting is that I'm reading Latin the way it was written 2000 years ago.
Here's what I read in order:
LLPSI with Colloquia Personarum, Pugio Bruti (waste of time btw) and Fabulae Syrae. After that I read Epitome Historiae Sacrae, the Vulgate, Fabulae Faciles, Ad Alpes, Julius Caesar's Invasion of Britain and half of LLPSI 2. Currently I'm reading The Gallic War. I also started studying German at the start of this year using the book "German for Reading" by Karl Sandberg which is taking up 1 hour per day of my time so I can't spend 2 hours on Latin per day which is what I was doing from 2020 to early 2022. I wouldn't say I'm fluent at all, but on a good day I can comfortably read Caesar (with a dictionary).
My goal since the start (January 2020) has been to read Ovid's Metamorphoses, which hasn't worked out yet, but it's a work in progress.
* Big shoutout to LatinTutorial/Benjamin:
- There used to be a few books, aimed at academics reading the literature, eg Jannach, "German for Reading Knowledge."
(on reading vs speaking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582262 )
Not to discourage you from a Sprachaufenthalt (ganz im gegenteil), but you can prepare for one by following germanophone papers. (which have the advantage that you've probably read many stories in your native tongue beforehand ... also one can start small by just picking out nouns at first, which won't the case for latin-1, but is very useful when learning a new script)
https://www.nzz.ch (in Schrifttüütsch, conveniently for you)
I don't normally follow AT, maybe https://kurier.at ?
Hals und Beinbruch!
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Edit: there are a couple of amusing anecdotes on german culture in http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm which I find stereotypical to this day:
> Germans liked things done in an official and formal manner, even in the midst of chaos, catastrophe and defeat. The Allies obliged, and gave the Germans various forms of very official-looking "surrender passes," ... http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/images/p4.jpg
> The Americans and British dropped leaflets on Berlin ... [with] key numbers in the corners, showing to which series they belonged ... Nazi authorities [sent] Hitlerjugend and Hitlermädel out to pick up the leaflets and turn them in for destruction. ... What the Nazis discovered—too late, too late—was that the schoolchildren had begun collecting the leaflets, using the key numbers to make up perfect sets. Some numbers were rarer than others, so that the Hitlerite children swapped Allied leaflets all over Berlin, trying to make up attractive albums. Mother and Father—who did not dare pick the leaflets up off the street for fear the Gestapo might be watching—found a convenient file, reasonably complete, in the room of little Fritzl or Ermintrude!
Undoubtedly not just a loose file, but neatly punched in a two-ring binder. When Oceania starts to always have been at war with Eurasia (that is, if they read their own books, which Dr. Linebarger doubts), they'll have to make up propaganda sets in the form of Panini cards.
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