FACILITATING the STUDY of GERMAN for CHEMISTS* R. NORRIS SHREVE
AND
JOHN' T. FOTOS
Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana
This is a description of the n m work being given at Purdue University in the Department of Modern Languages, with the collaboration of Professor Shrme of the DeMrtment of Chemical Engineering, to facilitate the w e of widely wed German chemical reference books, and acquaint the students with these books, so thot they will become more familiar with German chemical terms. The work is carried out by the use of multigraphed pages, which are exact cofi'es of selected pages found in the German reference books.
++++++ N THE course of our work with upper classmen, in the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University it became apparent that these students, even though they had had two years of German, could not read as well as they might the German that was expected of them, in such reference books as Ullmann's '%nzyklopiidie der technisclzen Chemie," Beilstein's "Handbuch," and Gmeliu's "Handbuch." However, the di5culty was diagnosed to be due not only to a lack of knowledge of the technical vocabulary used and the constructions encountered, but there was also a decided psychological disinclination on the part of the students to use these handbooks of many volumes. They seemed to think that the more ponderous the volumes, the more difficult would be the German. Those of us who have used these reference books know that this is not the case. It seemed to us that these and other widely used reference books could well be the basis for instruction in German. It was manifestly impossible to put into the hands of each student these sets of volumes costing the large sums that they do; consequently, a series of multigraphed excerpts from these and other reference volumes was prepared and used as the basis for instructional work in the second-year German. For this purpose excerpts were taken from the following - reference books:
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ULLUN: "Enzyklopiidie der technischn Chemie" BEILSTEIN:"Hundbuch d n orgunischen Chemie" GMELIN-KRAUT:"Handbuch der enorgankchen Chemie" HOWEN: "Methoden der or~onischenChemie" OBERHOPPER: "Das tednkEhc Eisen"
cal German as found in the literature which he must read in his junior and senior years, as well as after his graduation from the university. We were much pleased to find that the student's interest in this type of reading was enhanced in comparison with simple abridged scientific German selections that might or might not have any direct bearing upon his particular field. I t should be remarked here that in these classes only students of chemistry and chemical engineering were grouped. Indeed a t Purdue we have between 125 and 150 students in these classes. In the choice of articles, the object was to have the matter chosen of such nature from a chemical viewpoint that the students would be actually learning something of value to them. Naturally, this also called for rather up-to-date selection of material. As a consequence of our experience with this method of instruction, we have been able to give our students a much better facility in the handling of ordinary chemical German. Indeed this has been so encouraging that we have decided to go farther. Beginning with the next scholastic year, we shall start with the same type of German selections in the beginning class which, in Purdue, is in the freshman year. In other words, after the beginners have had instruction in the elements of grammar, sentence structure, and wordorder, during the first few months we shall go directly to simpler excerpts from technical German. The student will thus become familiar with the German vocabulary and constructions which he will need for later use, instead of learning a literary vocabulary which will not be of much help to h i in reading chemical German. For these freshman selections it was thought that some of the simpler paragraphs from Ullmauu would be appropriate, as Ullmann's style is not so diicult nor so complicated as most chemical German literature. Such selections have now been multigraphed for classroom use. Here, as in the case of the more advanced German, the same principles were kept in mind, namely, to excite the student's interest and afford some instructional value in chemistry. WORD STUDY
To facilitate the student's abiity to read chemical German and to save time, a word study has been undertaken to determine the two thousand words which occur most frequently in this type of German. Recent studies show that a knowledge of these words, together with the verb suffices for reading approximately 95% of ordinary chemical German. In other
The excerpts used were exact reproductions of the material found in these volumes. ~h~ object of these selections was to familiarize the students from the beginning with the form and appearance of ,-hemi-sented before the Division of Chemical Education of the A. C. S. at Denver, Colorado, August 23,1932.
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words, a chemist with a working knowledge of these two thousand most commonly occurring chemical German words would need to look up only a small number of other words. This word count is being taken from the d i e r e n t selections of German included in the main selections and is being carried out by some of the better students under the supervision of Professor Fotos. It should be emphasized that this word count taken from these handbooks represents considerable variety of authors and branches of chemical science. A number of our colleagues in other institutions
IT WAS IN THISBUILDINGTIIAT THE
have used these multigraphed pamphlets for instructional work and have so encouraged us in the effort we are making that we have decided in the course of the next year to bring this out in book form. In this presentation there will be included not only extensive selections for the freshmen and more advanced classes, but also introductory chapters on chemical nomenclature, on the construction of chemical German expressions, notes on the text selected, and last but not least, the two thousand chemical German words resulting from our word count.
K A N S A S RESRARCBES ON W E R E STARTED
LIQUIDANMONIA
This building, now in use as quarters for the journalism department, overlooks the famed valley of the Wakarusa. Not so many years before its construction, an observer standing on its site could have seen at a distance of a mile or so the "Forty-Niners" just started on their way to California.
