Horizon

German Science Readers VI: Fiedler and Sandbach's First German Course

H.G. Fielder and F. E. Sandbach
A First German Course for Science Students
Oxford University Press, 1920

Fiedler and Sandbach grasp at the same strange goal as Fotos and Bray: teaching scientific German to students who don't even know Der Bol ist rot. Unlike their Purdue counterparts, however, they don't even come close. In fact, A First German Course for Science Students is so woefully inadequate as a text that I can only conclude that the British school system of the time was unacquainted with the explanation/vocabulary/exercise lesson format.

The first forty pages of the volume consist of readings, the next forty of a systematic grammar, and the book ends with a 37 page glossary. The grammar section is the closest the book comes to language instruction, but is still merely a chart of conjugations and rules. Really, it's not so bad as a reference grammar, but that's the problem — you don't use reference grammars to teach beginners!

The inadequacies of the book for classroom use can be inferred from the disgruntled pencil-markings at the head of each reading. The authors helpfully provide section numbers for the grammatical rules a reading depends on. So, for example, the header of reading 4.A, Der Luft ist ein Körper is noted "Gram. sections 82, 84, 91, 92". Next to those, the miserable student has added "94, 96, 135-137".

That said, the book makes a pretty good reader. Although the grammar, rather than the vocabulary, is graduated, the book is still accessible to an intermediate speaker like me. The authors exercise students in all three persons by adopting the spoken lecture format — "Yesterday we learned...", "How do you explain...", "I will demonstrate...". Combined with the abundant diagrams (which also provide the redundancy necessary for a reader), the effect is charming:

We're sitting in a Chemistry class in Weimar Berlin, speculating on why hydrogen baloons lose their lift after a while. The guy three seats down raises his hand and volunteers. "Ich glaube, der Wasserstoff war schwerer geworden." ("I think the hygrogen got heavier.") Enraged, Herr Professor casts a Teutonic lightening bolt at the unfortunate student: "Nein, der nächste! Geben Sie eine bessere Erklärung!". Our scientific confidence overcomes our incapacity in German, and we answer correctly.

Posted by Ben Brumfield at September 14, 2006 05:02 AM