This postOn Saturday I hunted down a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in German from the library (it’s called Kinder- und Hausmärchen). Since yesterday was a holiday here in Utah (Pioneer Day), I couldn’t go to work, so — poor me! — I had to stay at home and read. :)
An hour later, I was a page and a half into the first tale (about the Froschkönig, the frog king). Spent another fifteen minutes reading it this morning instead of studying Swahili (yes, yes, I know, but you’ve got to admit that fairy tales are just a tad bit more interesting). I’ve had to look up almost every word in the dictionary, but in this morning’s reading I found that more of the vocab was sticking, and it’s getting faster. And oh my goodness it’s so fun! I think I’m going to postpone the whole Welsh thing until September, so that my language study throughout August will be from the Kindermärchen.
You know, jumping right into a text like this is a smashing way to learn a language. All you need is a rough overview of the language, and then in you dive. Sink or swim, you’ll have one heck of a time. :P In my own experience, particularly with the Grimm brothers, I’m sure there’s stuff I’m missing out on — I haven’t learned all the conjugations and whatnot — but context does wonders for comprehension, and I’m not entirely convinced that I need to know everything. Not at this point. I’m not analyzing the text, I’m reading it for the story, and as long as I can follow the plot, that’s good enough for now. Someday when I read German fluently I’ll come back and get everything I missed the first time round. As I’m reading, I tell myself to ignore the red flags calling out to me to learn the gender of nouns and find out precisely which meaning was intended, because I’ve found so far that they get in the way. I’ll pick it up naturally through reading, along with studying it properly in textbooks, separately. While I’m reading, though, I need to stay afloat, and the more I have to go to the dictionary, the harder that is. (Incidentally, C.S. Lewis talks about this somewhere — he was reading Grimm in German, which is what originally gave me the idea. I’ll have to dig up the reference.)
Learning a language through reading real, live texts teaches you in a way that textbooks rarely do. It’s language in its native habitat, not locked up in a zoo where kids poke it and laugh at it. And while it is kind of intimidating at first — “I don’t know this language! How on earth am I supposed to read it?!?!?” — you get the thrill of skydiving or bungee jumping but without all the corporeal danger. :)
