A GERMAN DRILL BOOK CONTAINING MATERIALS ESSENTIAL TO BEGINNERS BY FRANCIS KINGSLEY BALL, PH.D. INSTRUCTOR IN GREEK AND GERMAN IN THE PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY BOSTON, U. S. A. D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS OF PREFACE HIS little book presents in a systematic and concise form THIS such materials for the study of German as teachers are accustomed to collect, at great expense of time and labor, from the grammar, the dictionary, the reader, the sight book, the composition book, and other sources. To facilitate reviews and drill work, the book is arranged by topics, which both teachers and students will easily find. A word of explanation with regard to the use of the book may not be out of place. The author's classes in German do written work with every lesson. Heretofore, the classes have met five hours a week. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday are taken up with exercises from a grammar. For Wednesday, a review is required from the Drill Book, covering the ground of the preceding four lessons. The hour on Wednesday is given to an examination on the review, and some additional test is added. At the beginning of the year, this test is the inflection of nouns and adjectives, or a word list, with a sentence or two from the materials beginning on page 135. Toward the middle of the fall term, when the students know the commonest inflections of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and have a small vocabulary, more difficult English-German sentences are set, with a bit of GermanEnglish, selected from the passages beginning on page 145. By the end of the fall term, the important inflections, including the irregular verbs and the mood auxiliaries, have been studied once. and reviewed week by week from the Drill Book. Besides this, about fifty pages of easy prose have been read. After Christmas, reading is begun from some elementary text. As exercises for Thursday and Monday, the students write out 926644 at sight, in their own rooms, translations of German selections (pages 145-212). These translations are read aloud in class, criticised, and handed in at the end of the hour. For the other two days, Friday and Tuesday, written exercises from a composition book are required. The German is read aloud in class, written on the blackboard, and the papers handed in. The work on Wednesday is from some part of the Drill Book : a word list, a few irregular verbs, a pronoun, a preposition, or a prefix, etc., with connected passages from English into German and German into English. A part of the hour on Thursday or Friday is used in going over the test of Wednesday. A version of the English-German is written on the blackboard. This is copied into notebooks, and reviewed for the following Wednesday. Practice of this kind increases gives them confidence in them-. New words are underscored, German passages for sight translation are at first done orally, in the classroom, to show the students how to attack them. With the abundance of material in this book, such oral work should be done whenever there is time. But all assigned translations are written; for this is the only safe way. The students are encouraged to guess at the meanings of new words, and to leave no blanks in their papers. the students' reading power, and selves, which is half the battle. and afterwards looked up in the dictionary. In the winter term, the German-English translations are written as nearly in the German order as sense will allow. In this way words are not left out, and, best of all, the German is soon understood in its order, without translating at all. This method will also make the translation of English into German far easier. In the spring term all translations into English are written in the normal English order. Hereafter, the work at Exeter of fitting for the elementary examinations for college will extend over a period of two years, four hours each week. The same general plan, however, will be followed, only more slowly. During the second year, and during a third year of advanced German, this book can be thoroughly reviewed. Page 19 should be used constantly in learning and reviewing nouns. Students soon master this page, and acquire the habit of classifying nouns in their reading. Pages 66 and 67 are very useful in learning and reviewing the strong verbs. From the beginning of the study of German, attention should be paid to the analysis and derivation of words. In the footnotes to the inseparable prefixes and the word groups, some derivations have been introduced to encourage teachers and students to use the English dictionary. This study will be found not only interesting, but highly profitable. The way to learn to use words correctly is first to discover what they mean. This must be done with the dictionary. The references in this book are to page and section, or to page and footnote. For example, 4,3 should be read "four, three"; and 48 should be read "four, footnote three." This system of reference will save much time; for pages are found far more quickly than sections numbered consecutively. The sentences on pages 135-137 are mostly selected, with some changes, from the College Entrance Board, the Princeton, and the Yale examination papers. The English on pages 142-144 is taken almost without change from Harvard papers. Pages 210-212 contain scientific passages for admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Miss Deering and Mme Mondan have kindly permitted me to use their excellent "German Selections for Sight Translation.” Pages 146–173 have been taken mostly from the pamphlet of Miss Deering, and pages 174-190 mostly from that of Mme Mondan. Dr. Wilhelm Bernhardt permits me to print Der arme Musikant und sein Kollege from his Deutsches Sprach- und Lesebuch. |
