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Bilingual Texts for German? | ||
Tags: Bilingual texts | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4084 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes  Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 1 of 14 26 November 2013 at 5:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Any recommendations for bilingual texts for learning German?
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| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5322 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 2 of 14 26 November 2013 at 9:56am | IP Logged | ||
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I've already posted in another thread that German library card holders can download a couple of bilingual English-German ePubs for free. (If you don't have an ePub reader, you can download ADE and couple of other free reading apps.)
To find the nearest library with ePub support visit the Onleihe website. If your library supports ePub lending, search for dtv zweisprachig and/or Krimis für Kids. You can also download Aglona Reader, which offers a couple of German-English titles, from Aschenputtel to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Doitsujin on 27 November 2013 at 10:00am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 3 of 14 26 November 2013 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Are you looking to buy parallel texts? Or are PDFs/e-books ok?
Penguin has a book called "Short Stories in German: New Penguin Parallel Texts" "First German Reader for Beginners" is also a set of bilingual stories and has decent reviews on Amazon. I've also got a book of parallel texts of short science fiction stories and another of "selected folktales". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 4 of 14 27 November 2013 at 12:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Not a recommendation, but if looking in Amazon, trying searching using keywords like
"zweisprachig" "Deutsch-Englisch" "bilingual" "parallel text" and variations on that theme, and see what comes up. You might find something that appeals. (This works on UK amazon, and I assume also would work on amazon.de). I notice that quite a lot of the hits I get are in Kindle editions. (If you don't have a Kindle, you can download them to a laptop/PC using Kindle-for-PC, then use the freeware Calibre to convert them to other formats. Calibre's own reader is quite good for reading on a laptop/PC, although there are other possibilities.). BTW, if you already have access to original texts and good-ish translations (accurate and not too free), you can produce your own parallel texts using the aforementioned Aglona Reader, in edit mode. That takes some getting used to, but once you do, it's quite easy, and you are exposed to a lot of the language in the process. For anyone starting out, I'd advise starting with short texts, not whole books. Possibly short stories. EDIT: By the way, preparing parallel texts helps to remind you that translations have to be handled with care, and vary quite a bit in quality. Edited by montmorency on 27 November 2013 at 1:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5191 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 5 of 14 27 November 2013 at 3:05am | IP Logged | ||
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I can vouch for this Penguin Parallel Text, though you will need at least B1 reading level to get anything out of it (probably C2+ to fully understand everything). Get the paperback because the Kindle edition is an epic fail.
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| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4854 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 14 27 November 2013 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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The German works that get the dual-language treatment are usually fairly highbrow and
have corresondingly advanced vocabulary and syntax, so aren't necessarily appropriate for early-stage learning. The Penguin short stories and the misleadingly-titled "First German Reader" by Harry Steinhauer fall into this category, although they are otherwise great. Also, I find that longer texts from a single author are better than short stories for learning, as words and structures tend to be repeated throughout the text. As for recommendations, the Dover publications book of "Selected Folktales" by the brothers Grimm is fairly easy if antiquated reading, and their Kafka compilation is great if rather hard. Plays are fairly easy to understand, e.g. "Der Besuch der Alten Dame" and "Biedermann und die Brandstifter". Finally, the German publisher DTV has an excellent selection of zweisprachig books in many languages, and has the advantage that the German translations are modern German. If you don't mind the fact that source material isn't German literature they offer a huge amount of material. DTV Zweisprachig Edited by TehGarnt on 27 November 2013 at 2:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 14 27 November 2013 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
What's the problem with the Kindle edition? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5191 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 8 of 14 28 November 2013 at 12:14am | IP Logged | ||
As evidenced by the Amazon reviews, this particular Kindle "parallel" text isn't parallel. It's simply 85 pages of German followed by 85 pages of English. Which kind of defeats the purpose. In fact I don't know if Kindles are capable of this at all. Long live paper books! 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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