German language resources
December 12, 2019 11:19 AM Subscribe
Looking to revise my rusty German language skills as I will need them for work. Can you recommend me resources like books, podcasts, movies etc that I could immerse myself in? I studied German for many years before letting it slide so assume I know the grammar and can understand material intended for native speakers with a bit of effort. Bonus: anything using international/European relations vocabulary.
Die Heute Show is a weekly news satire in the mold of The Daily Show. It’s available for free online and has high quality subtitles. Naturally a lot of the content is about international and EU relations.
posted by jedicus at 11:40 AM on December 12, 2019
posted by jedicus at 11:40 AM on December 12, 2019
The goldmine is Deutsche Welle, which is free and works just about every angle.
My personal choice would be Krimis. With a decent VPN you can get them by the metric ton, and international relations definitely make for good murder motives. German subtitles are almost always available while you’re helping to train your ears. The slow news is a great tool but bring coffee.
posted by mrcrow at 12:38 PM on December 12, 2019
My personal choice would be Krimis. With a decent VPN you can get them by the metric ton, and international relations definitely make for good murder motives. German subtitles are almost always available while you’re helping to train your ears. The slow news is a great tool but bring coffee.
posted by mrcrow at 12:38 PM on December 12, 2019
All hail DW!
Some years ago they had a web-based language instruction program which was really good! But it may have disappeared. :7(
Listening to Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten makes me feel fuzzy-headed, because the speaker is.
So.
Careful.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:21 PM on December 12, 2019
Some years ago they had a web-based language instruction program which was really good! But it may have disappeared. :7(
Listening to Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten makes me feel fuzzy-headed, because the speaker is.
So.
Careful.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:21 PM on December 12, 2019
Hey, check it out, they're still around: https://www.dw.com/en/learn-german/german-courses/s-2547 (Which is probably the same page as mrcrow links to, only not the mobile version of the site.)
posted by wenestvedt at 1:23 PM on December 12, 2019
posted by wenestvedt at 1:23 PM on December 12, 2019
This seems interesting to me News in Slow German. But I've not tried it so it's not a recommendation.
posted by tmdonahue at 1:58 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by tmdonahue at 1:58 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
I do listen to News in Slow German and it's great. And it's a separate property from Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten so you can do two different things!
I can also provide an anti-recommendation. My partner and I tried watching one of our fave US TV shows dubbed on Netflix (The Good Place), with subtitles on in the spoken language so we could make sure we were "getting" what was said. Which was when we learned that the captioning and dubbing scripts are done by two entirely different teams and have radically different translations.
posted by rednikki at 4:47 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
I can also provide an anti-recommendation. My partner and I tried watching one of our fave US TV shows dubbed on Netflix (The Good Place), with subtitles on in the spoken language so we could make sure we were "getting" what was said. Which was when we learned that the captioning and dubbing scripts are done by two entirely different teams and have radically different translations.
posted by rednikki at 4:47 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Do you really need the German to be read slowly? (German is not like French, where the phonology is difficult for English speakers and slow news is a godsend; standard German phonology is easy enough for us to understand and produce.) A better approach may be to just watch normal German news and info shows, where the announcers and narrators anyway are speaking in a style much clearer and easy to understand than everyday spoken German. If you don't understand everything immediately just listen on and don't sweat, your subconscious will be listening and processing and combined with your other studying eventually explicit comprehension will come!
Tagesschau and Tagesthemen are superb half-hour national news shows. You can watch one of them daily and become an expert on German politics! Definitely good for international relations vocab, too. Both are available on youtube as well, so you can watch on your smart tv. You might also benefit from the Mit Offenen Karten series, where the 12-minute episodes focus on basic facts and issues in international geography, broadly speaking.
Youtube is also a good source for German language documentaries aka Dokus, where you'll hear the super-clear narrator German plus somewhat less clear conversational German from interviewees. There are a pretty limitless number of topics that Dokus have been made about, so you should be able to find films that interest you.
To hear real conversational German, you could try watching crime shows aka Krimis. You definitely won't understand every word -- I speak and read German pretty well and still don't -- but, again, stick with it to let the sound of actual vernacular German sink in. There are Tatort shows -- a popular Krimi series --based in various different German cities, so you can become aware of the significant regional variations in accent.
The ARD Mediathek is in general a super source for streaming German TV shows of all types. Good to explore.
If you want an instructional book to work through for review, Practicing German Grammar is pretty good. Make sure to get both the textbook and a matching workbook of the same edition. Also, check out the instructional resource list at the language learner's forum.
Finally, just read as much as you can. Get a good monolingual German dictionary and sit down regularly with whatever reading material interests you and slog through accumulating vocabulary and idioms. (For a monolingual dictionary I love the Wahrig. For an online multi-language dictionary leo is pretty good.) The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is a good national newspaper to read. To get books from Germany I love abebooks. I browse on the German Amazon site and then order used from abebooks. It can't hurt to read the classics, like Goethe. Or the romantic poetry of Eichendorff, which is easy to read and will teach you about the German Soul. Much recent literature is also not difficult, such as that from Heinich Böll. Really, read as much as you can.
posted by bertran at 7:00 PM on December 12, 2019 [6 favorites]
Tagesschau and Tagesthemen are superb half-hour national news shows. You can watch one of them daily and become an expert on German politics! Definitely good for international relations vocab, too. Both are available on youtube as well, so you can watch on your smart tv. You might also benefit from the Mit Offenen Karten series, where the 12-minute episodes focus on basic facts and issues in international geography, broadly speaking.
Youtube is also a good source for German language documentaries aka Dokus, where you'll hear the super-clear narrator German plus somewhat less clear conversational German from interviewees. There are a pretty limitless number of topics that Dokus have been made about, so you should be able to find films that interest you.
To hear real conversational German, you could try watching crime shows aka Krimis. You definitely won't understand every word -- I speak and read German pretty well and still don't -- but, again, stick with it to let the sound of actual vernacular German sink in. There are Tatort shows -- a popular Krimi series --based in various different German cities, so you can become aware of the significant regional variations in accent.
The ARD Mediathek is in general a super source for streaming German TV shows of all types. Good to explore.
If you want an instructional book to work through for review, Practicing German Grammar is pretty good. Make sure to get both the textbook and a matching workbook of the same edition. Also, check out the instructional resource list at the language learner's forum.
Finally, just read as much as you can. Get a good monolingual German dictionary and sit down regularly with whatever reading material interests you and slog through accumulating vocabulary and idioms. (For a monolingual dictionary I love the Wahrig. For an online multi-language dictionary leo is pretty good.) The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is a good national newspaper to read. To get books from Germany I love abebooks. I browse on the German Amazon site and then order used from abebooks. It can't hurt to read the classics, like Goethe. Or the romantic poetry of Eichendorff, which is easy to read and will teach you about the German Soul. Much recent literature is also not difficult, such as that from Heinich Böll. Really, read as much as you can.
posted by bertran at 7:00 PM on December 12, 2019 [6 favorites]
So many good resources here! If you want the wonderfully cheesy high school language class feeling, check out the episodes of Extr@ on YouTube. It's a soap about 20-somethings living in Berlin made for language learners.
posted by beyond_pink at 6:23 AM on December 13, 2019
posted by beyond_pink at 6:23 AM on December 13, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by caek at 11:37 AM on December 12, 2019 [8 favorites]