German

I need to learn German for the sake of reading to prep for the grad program I'd like to get into, but my school doesn't offer a reading knowledge course. Can anyone suggest either a book or a university that has such an course online?

Thanks!

Are you a beginner at German?

If you are, the Kauderwelsch Sprachführer are a good place to start. There is German and German slang. They focus on talking, but they have a nice way of explaining how the language works - for example they provide the word-by-word translation first, and then the correct translation in English.

The Kauderwelsch site links to Assimil - they have German with ease and On the road. I don't knwo if these are good, though.

If nobody else replies here you could ask Reise Know How directly if they have an idea where to find what you are looking for.

You could also look at the tag german language and at the related subjects (right hand column).

You can load the tag german language - see all works and then search for 'read' on that page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Edit: Or search for reading german, german reading etc.

Thanks for your thorough response! You've given me a great list of places to look through. Much appreciated.

:-)

You could also switch to www.librarything.de ;-)

Come to think of it, you could post your question to German Library Thingers - but do mention if you're a newbie to German or if you know some basics already.

Looking for german reading on amazon also gives some interesting hits, for example this.

If none of this helps (enough), you might want to contact inlingua. They are a very good language school - if they don't have the class you need they might be able to tell you where else to look.

And then of course there's Google: learn german online ->

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc.

Another way might be to look at Wikipedia articles about subjects that interest you - they're not translations of the English texts, but in general the information should be more or less the same, so you have some sort of parallel texts.

Even for grad school-type reading, getting a German translation of any fairly long book you're familiar with in your first language can be a huge help. Knowing I love languages, an author friend sends me copies of all her new translations, and having Bible portions in languages that interest me is always a tremendous help too.

It's a little late in coming, I hope you were accepted into the program you wanted.

I might suggest you look at Duden Das Bildwörterbuch, I found it most helpful while I was in Germany

Another resource is Amazon.de. Look for books you already know well. Buy a bunch at a time, and buy them new from Amazon. AbeBooks.de has used books, but you want to buy all from one seller. Shipping and EU export taxes can be expensive.

I buy movies from Amazon.de as well, you can watch in English with German subtitles, or in German with English subtitles. GERMAN DVDs are in PAL FORMAT REGION CODE 2! You will need to buy a player that can translate the format into NTSC to watch on a US TV. www.regioncodefreedvd.com has some for under $100. Make sure the input voltage will accept 120V and you can output NTSC from a PAL source if you go this route.

There are also some software companies that create software to play foreign DVDs on your computer, but you may be limited by firmware encoding on the DVD player in your computer. I re-flash mine whenever I can not change regions anymore, but it is pretty complex (requires booting with a DOS disk I made special, running a flash program with firmware designed for that model DVD player, etc.) If any of that makes you feel uncomfortable go with the purchase a player on the internet option.

It's worth knowing that Duden also publishes Picture dictionaries for other languages - bilingually with German. We keep the English one around as a translation help.

hallo! ich kenne nicht sehr gut how to spriche deutsch, but i'm learning... in hs. =D my frau's good. she's authentic!