THE NEW AMERICAN METHOD OF TEACITING GERMAN* HAKRISON HALEAND ALEREDE. LUSSKV,UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS,FAYETTEYILLE, ARKANSAS
This article contains a description of the method i n use for smeral years to teach the student of science to read German for comprehension. It i s belienred that i n much less time it gives the student the ability to read. the German text intelligently. Further, by this method much sooner than by the older ones, he becomes able to read understandingly zithout the medium of translation.
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A reading knowledge of German is necessary for the chemist. The method of teaching German to be described seems to be decidedly superior to the older methods in training the student of science. Hence we have felt it would be of interest to those responsible for the training of chemists. It is called n e w e l l , because it i s new. It is called American because it is peculiarly well adapted, we think, to American conditions. In Europe the usual goal for a student of language is to acquire the ability to speak the foreign tongue. When a young man in Germany, for example, prepares himself for the hotel business, he generally finds i t to his advantage to spend half a year or so in England and France. By this sojourn in the foreign country he does learn to speak the new language, no one would deny it, but his vocabulary, one will soon find, is extremely limited. But he has learned enough words for his purpose, namely to deal in a businesslike way with the English and French patrons of the hotel in Germany where he is later employed. Now i n America the goal of the student essaying the learning of the foreign tongue, let us say German, is quite different from that of the average young man in Germany learning English. The student in America, for very practical reasons, has for his almost exclusive aim the acquisition of the ability to read. the printed page, and he keeps this main goal in view constantly, whether the teacher likes i t or not. He differs, furthermore, from the German in this, that he is intent upon and does succeed sooner or later in acquiring a great vocabulary, a passive one so far as oral speech is concerned, but an extremely active one for his own purpose, namely, that of reading for comprehension from the German printed text. The practical reasons for this state of affairs in America are not far to seek. At the University of Arkansas, out of fifty students enrolled this first semester in advanced German, that is students taking second-, third-, and fourth-year German, thirty-three are majoring in some natural science; exactly sixty-six per cent of the total enrolment in advanced German classes. Now just what is it that this proportionately great number of science students wants with German? Are these science
* Presented before the Division of Chemical Education of the A. C. S. st Indianapolis. Indiana, March 31, 1931. 1581
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students perchance preparing to enter the German-speaking ministry of religion? Do they entertain notions of editing a German newspaper after graduation? Will many, or any, of them ever enter the United States diplomatic service in Germany, where a speaking knowledge of German will be absolutely essential? Why, of course, they will very probably do none of those things. These science students wish to be able to read German books and periodicals dealing with their chosen subjects in the natural sciences. Most of them would, frankly, not learn German a t all, provided those scientific books and periodicals were by some miracle translated into English during their trip across the Atlantic. A second reason for the stress that advanced students place upon the speedy acquisition of the ability to read German from the printed page is that these students seldom take more than two years of the language and in many instances they take only one. So, conditions being as they are, namely, that the students taking German are mainly students majoring in the natural sciences and interested in German chiefly as a tool, i t is not fair or even practical to spend one-half or all of the time they devote to German on the acquisition of a mastery of sheer German grammar. The originator of the method is Dr. George F. Lussky, Professor of German in the University of Minnesota, where this method has been used by him with excellent results, he tells us, for the last six years. He plans to publish his outline in book form sometime this year. The objective of this method is, as has been indicated before, to teach the student to read German for comprehension and to do this in one year or less. The first textbook we use has been prepared by Dr. George Lussky in collaboration with Dr. Karl Ermisch of the University of Minnesota and contains sixty-six pages. It is divided into two parts, a reader of twenty-nine pages and a reference grammar of thirty-seven pages and is designed to extend over the first ten or twelve weeks of the student's beginning work in German. The reader is divided into ten lessons, each of which has a reading selection of about thirty lines, about eight exercises based on the reading selection, a set of twelve German questions also based on the text, and a very complete vocabulary of the words occurring in the specific lesson. One big feature of this method is that the student begins to read German from the very first day, for this elementary book is printed in English characters-Roman type. The method takes into consideration that the scientific student who elects German will later read German books and scientific periodicals printed exclusively in Roman type. The idea is to proceed from the known to the unknown. The student's second book is "Geschichten und Maerchen" by Foster and Wooley (I), Part I of which is printed in Roman type but Parts I1 and I11 in Old English. Thus the student also becomes acquainted with German printed in the latter characters.
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This second book will be used from about Thanksgiving until Easter. The third hook, to be read from Easter to the end of the first year, is Schmidt's "Beriihmte Deutsche Neuerer Zeit" (2) and is printed in Roman type exclusively. Even a t that the Old English type should not offer tremendous difficulties later on, for the student surely is able to read the title of a newspaper like the Arkansas @arettewhich appears in Old English. Each lesson in the reader calls attention to certain portions of the reference grammar treated in that particular reading selection, and by the time the student has reached the end of the last lesson in the reader, he will a t the same time have covered every paragraph in the grammar, so carefully have the reader and grammar been knit together. But this grammar material, upon which the whole reader is based, has been scaled down by the author to the very minimum. And well it might be, for consider: the whole purpose of this method is t o teach the reading of German for comprehension. Hence the student can always assume a correct German text to begin with, which he must merely try to understand. The student does not have to be ahle to construct the German text himself; it is a given quantity which he must simply read and try to comprehend. So, according to this method, there are many points of grammar for the mastery of which he is never, during his first year of German a t least, held responsible. Remember, this student is a science major who wishes merely to be able to read swiftly but intelligently from the pages of German scientific books and periodicals. Let us try to show a t this point how little grammar, after all, a student needs t o know in order to absorb intelligently and completely the ideas presented to him in printed works through the medium of the foreign tongue. Let us take, for example, the German noun. Here the student must know that, whereas in English we have an abundance of ways to form our plurals, as house-houses, mouse-mice, ox-oxen, deer-deer, together with such seeming monstrosities as stratum-strata, phenomenon-phenomena, thesis-theses, the German language has only four ways: plurals ending in -e, some in -en, some in -er, and some with no ending a t all. Now from the science student's point of view, having in every case-as he has a right to assume-a correct German text before him, it is vastly more important for him t o he ahle to give the singular of any plural noun that he encounters in his reading than to he able to give the plural of the singular nouns found in the material before him. The reason is obvious: in any given case he must be ahle to reconstruct the singular from the plural in order to get a t the correct meaning of the word and the part it plays in the thought of the sentence he is trying t o ferret out. If the singular occurs, however, that is all he wants to know and needs to know for his purposes. Why, in all the world, should he be asked to give the plural of a word which actually occurs in the singular in the only place in which he is interested at the time?
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What is meant is just this: what difference dws it make to the student whether the plural of "Hand" is " H a n d or "Hande" or "Hiinden or "Handen" or "Hander," just as long as he knows that the singular is "Hand," that it means the English word "hand," and that German plurals in general are formed by the addition of -e, -en, -er, or without any ending. He can safely leave the worries over all further details to the German scholar that writes the book and gets the royalties from it-whatever they may be in these days of reparations and world-wide business depression. Let us next collar the pronoun and hold it up to the public gaze. Have any of you ever stopped to investigate how often-or rather how rarelythat evil demon of German grammar, the personal pronoun of the second person actually occurs in the reading matter of the poor bedevilled scientific student? Our answer is: practically never a t all! When does the profound German author fall into a mood sufficientlyconfidential to address his reader with a chatty "you"--that author who according to most reports is not even on a familiar footing with his own wife and children? So why chase the bewildered science student across the bending ice with those savage grammatical blood hounds of "du," "ihr," and "Sie" written with a capital, haying a t his heels? He will rarely, or perhaps never, meet with them again in all his born days! The next bunch of grammatical gangsters that we have to round up and deliver over to a just punishment is that motley array of inflectional endings of the German adjective. More students-and teachers. too, perhaps-have been robbed of their patience by these base malefactors, without ever getting anything back for all their pains, than by any other of the numerous train of armed assassins let loose upon the class from the pages of the average approved German grammars. Let us dispose of this matter briefly thus: the student with the reading goal does not need to know the adjective endings a t all, nor is he even conscious of these endings when he reads them. They represent merely so much supertluous print to him, much like the silent letters "ugh" in the English word "thought." And how many students, even after several years of German according to any method, are able to use the endings of the German adjective correctly and fluently? In regard to the German verb, the same thing applies that was mentioned a moment ago about the personal pronoun of the second person: the student of science does not need to know the second person. It will occur so seldom in his reading that the grammar need refer to it only in a footnote. The only verb fcirms he must know intimately are the first and especially the third persons. And with that unruly roisterer of a second person properly confined in the guardhouse, the rest of the verb conjugation presents a simple, neat, dress parade of real attraction and charm. And now, how about the German prepositionsthose four long lists
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showing which prepositions govern which case, all to be learned laboriously by heart upon pain of ex-communication from the serried ranks of the genuine thirsters after knowledge? How about the one list which gives the prepositions that are supposed to govern the dative if there is lack of motion implied and the accusative if there is motion implied and which, in reality, serves merely to drive the legalistic teacher into the mazes of "mental motion toward" and "mental abeyance of motion"? How about them, do yon ask? Why, the science student simply laughs a t all the lists. It is the learned author of the book or magazine article that must know his lists of prepositions, not the mere reader. What matters it to the student, in reading, whether a certain preposition happens to be followed by the dative, accusative, genitive, or even the nominative? The New American Method of Teaching German stresses, of course, the acquisition of a large vocabulary and emphasizes the principles of word-building in German, word-formation, prefixes, suffixes, principal parts of verbs; i t calls attention to troublesome words in translation, idiomatic constructions, idioms, synonymous expressions, words and phrases to be distinguished, and adds a useful list of helps on translation. Another appropriate feature of this new method is the provision it makes for the answering of questions put in German and based upon the text, for it asks that the answers be given either in German or English. The student is reading merely for the understanding of the text. Furthermore, in order to accomplish this aim thoroughly, he is required to read extensively and to do everything within his power to add constantly to his vocabulary. But the new method also demands that one fiaragrafih must be read intensively each day; this is done in order to make the student more and more conscious of the niceties of German diction and idiom. Further rules of German grammar are developed directly from the text as these points arise. Still another requirement of this new method is the reading aloud in German of every selection before translation into English, for the ultimate aim of the whole method is to advance the student to a proficiency in reading directly from the German text without the medium of translation. A valuable aid toward this end is unquestionably to he found also in frequent exercises in German dictation. If the science student returns for a second year of Geman, he is put through some good review book, as for instance, "German Grammar Review and Composition" by Dr. Baerg (3) of Wesleyan University, a work printed in Old English type, and later through a science work like "Technical and ScientificGerman" by Greenfield ( 4 ) ,printed in Roman type and containing articles of interest not only to the scientific student but also to the purely literary one. For, after all that has been said, one might readily hit upon the idea that if such a method for the rapid acquisition of a reading knowl-
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edge of German without the waste of valuable time and energy on superfluous grammar material is good for the science student who will never employ his knowledge of German for actual conversational purposes, i t surely will be just as good for the literary student who will use his knowledge of German just as rarely toward a speaking end. So to sum up: The N m American Method of Teaching German enables the student to learn to read the German text intelligently in one-fourth the time demanded of him by any of the older methods. In the second place, the student by this method, much sooner than by the older ones, gains the ability to read understandingly from the German text without the medium of translation. And just as Saul, the son of Kish, set out to seek his father's asses and found a kingdom, so also the intelligent student trained by this new method sets out to learn merely to read German from the printed page, and lo and behold, he very shortly gains also the ability to express himself in German, both orally and in writing, and can even readily understand German when spoken to him. And all of these things are added unto him with only one-fourth of the drudgery and needless memory work so rigidly insisted upon by the older methods of teaching German. Such certainly seem to be the results obtained from the use of this New
American Method of Teaching German. Literature Cited FOSTER, LILLIAN,
AND ELMER 0 . WOOLEY,"Geschichten und Maerchen fuer Anfaenper," D. C. Heath & Co., New York and London, 1929. Revised edition. F. G. G., "Beruehmte Deutsche Neuerer Zeit," Alfred A. Knopf. New (2) SCHMIDT, York City, 1929. "German Grammar with Composition," F. S. Crofts & Co., ( 5 ) BAERG,GERHARD, New York City, 1930. E. V.. "Technical and Scientific German," D. C. Heath & Co.. ( 4 ) GREENFIELD. New York and London, 1922. Revised edition.
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