German

German is an interesting language, often people who first look at German writing will shy away and say it looks difficult to learn, when in fact, it is not . . . it has a lot of words that are either similar-looking or similar-sounding, and, those big, long words you see in German are mostly combinations of smaller words.

For German, I have an all-time classic that I read first when I was in high school, and again later . . . it is one of the most relevant, and impact-having, books that you could read, a story that takes place during World War I, a perspective from the German side. If you have not read this book, after you do, you are not likely to ever forget it!

Im Westen nichts Neues (Also known as All Quiet On The Western Front)


Learning by reading short stories can be a lot of fun. So far I have not reviewed these translations, so they are still just raw translator output, so what you will see will be literal translations, which are much better at reflecting the language you are learning, but you will notice oddities with the gender translations, sentence order, and occasionally the whole comprehensibility of a sentence. Usually, that is what I review the text for, and I leave the literal translation intact, if I find a word that I cannot find a definition for, I leave that intact too. As mentioned earlier though, I have not reviewed these yet, but they should still be sufficient to pick up a considerable amount of the German language.

Tales from the Brothers Grimm