Charles Frederick Kroeh (1846–1944)

Charles F. Kroeh, A. M. was Professor of Modern Languages at the Stevens Institue of Technology, and his reader was self-published. Stevens is still in Hoboken today, and unlike many other schools, hasn't renamed itself as a University despite offering doctoral instruction. Apparently they didn't have a press in 1907, as Kreoh's other eleven books on French, German, and Spanish were all either self-published or released by Macmillan. The very titles speak to the changes in language pedagogy over the last century: nowadays you'd never find a fifty-nine page octavo on pronouncing French sold separately from The Living Method For Learning How To Think In French.

Scientific German is an odd little book. Kroeh announces that the reader will "attack the subject systematically." But his notion of a graduated reader is very different from the idea that would prevail later in the century: "[The selections] are arranged progressively and consist of fundamental definitions, descriptions, processes, and problems of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Physic[sic] and Chemistry." That is to say, the science is progressively introduced, not the language. In other words, any actual progressivity is a by-product of shared vocabulary. The introductory sentence on electricity uses the words for "square" and "square root", which were covered thirty chapters earlier in the chapters on arithmetic, so I guess this does work. Sort of.

The 112 page book is broken into 55 chapters, but each chapter averages only fifteen endnotes. This might seem like a lot, but those notes provide the only explanation of the language — there is no glossary, nor introduction. The result is very difficult to work through, but the subject matter is not without its charms. Part of this is nostalgia — the section on electiricty describes jute insulators — but much of the pleasure of reading Kroeh is trying to remember bits of math and science you learned as a teenager. Sara and I spent part of a drive back from Houston trying to figure out what a Wechselwinkel was from context in the geometry section and were stymied more by the limits of our geometetrical recall than by the German. Also, you learn some nifty arithmetical rules skipped over by my education:

Eine Zahl enthält den Fektor 11 und ist also durch 11 teilbar, wenn die Quersumme der ersten, dritten, fünften, siebenten etc. (d. h. der ungeradstelligen) gleich der Quersumme der 2., 4., 6., 8., etc. (d. h. der geradstelligen Ziffern, von der Rechten gegen die Linke gezählt, ist, oder die Differenz dieser beiden Quersummen 11 oder ein Mehrfaches von 11 beträgt.

(My translation):A number has a factor of 11 (and thus is divisble by 11) if the cross-sum of the first, third, fifth, seventh, etc. (i.e. the odd digits) is equal to the cross-sum of the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, etc. (i.e. the even digits), as measured from the right to the left, or the difference between these two cross-sums is 11 or a multiple of 11

About half of the people I talk to — all of whom are engineers — have never heard of that rule. I certainly hadn't until Charles Kroeh came along. Had you?… (meer)