Re: Identifying Gender in German

From: Mohammed Farooq (farooq_w_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 06/29/04 

Date: 29 Jun 2004 01:15:09 -0700

Thanks to everybody for good hints, actually I attended few
introductory German classes but but left the course in middle and
thought that I should try to learn on my own from self learning books,
because the teacher was focussing on spoken language (the class was of
more than 100 students and a single teacher, that was bit congested
and she couldn't pay attention to everyone) whereas I was more
interested in gaining a reading knowledge of "chemical German". Though
it is not a part of my course requirement degree but I was fascinated
by the huge work of 19th century fundamental chemical work was in
German.

A post appeared in soc.genealogy.britain long time ago, which said
"I have translated from 11 other languages (including German) into
English in the course of chemical research. The reason the course was
useless was that it was taught by lecturers (specialising in Mediaeval
German as it happened) from the German Department who imagined they
were there to teach us to speak cultured German. The test itself was
set by German-speaking chemists who expected us to translate written
German. After we all failed a new system was brought in. A chemist of
German origin was brought in. His first words were 'None of you will
speak or think a word of German during this course. The object is NOT
to speak German but to translate it.' He then indicated that there
were 23 sentence constructions in German which differed from English
sentence construction. We were trained to spot clues as to a 'German'
sentence
and rearrange the words into its corresponding English sentence form.
Then to read the transcribed form as poorly spelled English (but
correct chemistry). Next time the 'failures' took the test we all
passed at 95% or more and none of us took more than an hour for a 90
minute paper. "

Few experiments have been done in US universities, according to a 1933
article in J.Chem .Ed which the University started teaching and
translation directly from original papers of Berichte, Zietschrift.
Anal. Chem, etc. instead of learning grammar. According to authors the
experiment was higly successful and in authors' own words "... GRADE C
students were able to translate and show a reading knowledge of the
langauge to the department for the degree requirements.

I really liked this idea, but unfortunately such courses are not
offered here nor someone as expert both in German and Chemistry is
available nor I have come across any self-learning chemical German
books.

Is this way of learning worthwhile or just like running before
learning to walk?

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Making money from Java
    ... >> I once arrived at a busy junction and, knowing that traffic coming from ... German friend to translate it to German, and then pass that german text to a ... Chinese friend to translate the German version, then pass it to a French ... friend who is learning English to translate the Chinese version back to ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • Dog show critique: help with translation
    ... We showed our dog at a danish show last sunday - and the judge were ... We've been looking at the written critique, ... or me are fluent in german. ... It's the "seidlich" that we absolutely don't know how to translate. ...
    (de.rec.tiere.hunde)
  • Re: German language in anime
    ... I would simply leave it as Panzer Kunst. ... could refer to a vehicle and it could also apply to robots and cyborgs. ... Why didn't I translate it simply as armored arts as your ... Panzer comes from the middle German ...
    (rec.arts.anime.misc)
  • Re: in collaboration with
    ... sensible readers; B, in which they give information that may be needed by ... this is the case -- or "whatever a German wants it to ... throw them into a sentence and place "bzw." ... the best way to translate a Case G sentence is to distill out the ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: OBarr>Reality!
    ... but somehow I prefer german for longish texts ... >> it's up to Germans to translate English texts, ... "Arbeit macht frei" are three simple words that were ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)