My spoken German isn't very good. In fact, the last conversation I had with a German willing to practice ended with a recommendation that I join a group that was "more my level." That said, I can hobble along in written German at an intermediate level, and spend a few weeks each year trying to refresh and improve what I still remember.
It's hard to keep current on a language if you don't have time to participate in organized classes. The best solution I've found so far is to work my way through graduated readers. You can breeze through the first bits, picking up the occasional vocabulary word along the way, then hunker down as you approach the limits of your abilities. Best of all, half an hour of reading before bed each night is enough effort to show results, despite its unstructured approach.
Graduated readers are not easy to come by: though scores were published in German or French in the first half of the 20th century, you'll have trouble finding more than a handful of titles written since 1960. I've wondered why for a long time, until this passage from Fotos and Bray's 1938 German Grammar for Chemists and Other Science Students drove home the difference in pedagogy:
The study of German in our American colleges and universities maintains its position in the curriculum for two types of students: (1) for the student who is interested primarily in acquiring the ability to read the great works of German literature and incidentally the ability to speak and write the language, and (2) for the student of science and technology who is interested primarily in acquiring the ability to read the important scientific and technical writings in German books and periodicals.
It is hard to imagine any teacher of a modern language prioritizing their students' conversational ability as "incidental". Language instruction has moved from translation drills to the "communicative approach." I'm sure this is appropriate for teaching a living language to students in a classroom, but a side effect of the conversational emphasis is to leave out the loner with a book.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at May 22, 2006 08:51 PM