Over-ambition

[fivemack]

I've decided to try reading a well-received thriller (Franz Schätzing's Der Schwarm) in German, to improve my German.

This may be a foolish exercise, since the list of words I've had to look up so far include

Verschwindet	disappears
Heerscharen	hosts (multitudes)
die Qualle	jellyfish
Unterdessen	meanwhile
gewaltig	immense (general adjective of amplification)
Zangenkiefern	not sure (fangs? Zangen are forceps, but Kiefern are pine-trees)
Hingezaubert	conjured forth
Ahnen	to suspect
der Vorfall	incident
die Bedrohung	threat
der Fortbestand	continuity
vermeintlich	alleged
die Werbeagentur	advertising agency
ausgebildeter	trained (selbstausgebildet = self-trained)
der Taucher	diver
erfüllen	to accomplish

and I have only just finished reading the blurb before page one. You probably get an idea of the theme of the book from this vocabulary alone, in much the same way as, trying to read the lead article in a German newspaper, I learned in succession 'Mut' (courage), 'Pflicht' (duty) and 'Mehrwertsteuer' (value-added tax).

Comments

[angoel.livejournal.com]

Kiefern also means jaws. So Zangenkifern means jaws like pliers. So fangs would be an appropriate translation.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

The theory is sound, but I would try a book with a lower reading age first :-) Or make sure you've got a very good database... I did this with The Sword in the Stone, and got on a little faster. But I've forgotten all my German since...

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yikes; I actually remembered several words on that list (starting with the first, which made me feel all powerful; but the average went way down after that).

Back in the mid 1970s I read a couple of SF novels in german to try to keep mine up (I lived in Zurich the 1966-67 academic year, and then took 4 years of highschool german when I got back). And after that stopped trying, because, like, I live in the US and all that is far, far away.

Newspapers

[http://the.earth.li/~alex/halley/ (from livejournal.com)]

Now that need dictates I get all my news online I've taken to having a schedule of sources, a different outlet every day, with one day a week being a French newspaper. My thinking there is I've a good chance of guessing much of the news so the odd bit of linguistic confusion doesn't matter so much. Then again, there's little chance of hordes of jellyfish, nor of reading about them in the bath.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

cybersofa reckons the best way to learn a language is to buy comic books in it. I learned a lot from reading a book in German that I knew almost off by heart in English (When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr).