The Logos Academic Blog
Part 3 of Translating German Texts with Logos
I am not a linguist. I have not studied pedagogy. I am not a native German speaker nor do I consider myself fluent. Furthermore, I have never taught German. So what I offer in this post is not the wisdom of an expert or even opinions of an aficionado. My aims and goals are simple: the exchange of resources, information, and tools from one student to another.
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by Jacob Cerone
While digital resources can certainly be read from “cover to cover”—and should be—one of the things that I have found most exciting about Logos Bible Software as a digital library platform is the way it has reimagined what we can do with books and the way we approach their contents. [Read more…]
by Jacob Cerone
Translation is no easy task. It requires extensive knowledge, not just of the source and target languages, but also of the topic under discussion in the text at hand. Without proficiency in the target language—usually the translator’s mother tongue—comical translations can result. [Read more…]
Learning a new language—whatever language that might be—takes time and effort. German is no different. Some might even say that certain features make it a more difficult language than others. This is partly due to the fact that German is an inflected language; it has a host of irregular verbs, the gender of nouns is not readily apparent from their endings but must be memorized, and there are those tricky issues of verb placement and separable prefixes.
Thus, German is the bane and solace of many biblical scholars of whatever subdiscipline. [Read more…]
You could tell I was one of them. The hole-punched cards hanging from a steel ring on my belt loop gave me away.
I was an ancient language student.
The cards were my flashcards, and I didn’t go anywhere without them: to class, to the student dining room, to the dorm, to the movies, even to weddings. I would flip through them whenever I had a spare moment.
I had to, because learning a new language requires discipline and perseverance. Even after you’ve conquered the grammatical and syntactical intricacies of the language, you still need to add more (and more) words to your vocabulary storehouse—and somehow maintain what you’ve already learned.
While flashcards were helpful, I found they weren’t enough. I needed a better way to learn new words and reinforce the words I already knew.