Overview of the German Basic Course

The German Basic Course is designed to provide students with a useful knowledge of the structure of the spoken language and with a basic vocabulary to use in both official and social situations. Each unit consists of basic memorized drills, vocabulary drills, pronunciation drills, and conversational practice.

Units 1 - 12 introduce numbers, present tense of common verbs, gender, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and future and past tenses of common verbs.

Units 13 - 24 include added work in the past tenses, the pluperfect tense, the subjunctive tense, infinitives, conditional tenses, auxiliary verbs, relative pronouns, present and past participles, and additional study of prepositions and conjunctions.

Preface

This Basic course in German has been designed to assist United States Government representatives who require a command of spoken German. The general concept of this text has grown out of the plan of Spoken Language courses prepared under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies during World War II. But pattern drills and other exercises have been developed extensively at the Foreign Service Institute to provide a much fuller manipulation of forms and patterns, and a conscious attempt has been made to adapt situations and vocabulary to specific needs of the Foreign Service. And the course is intended to lay a solid foundation for comprehensive language skills, providing systemically for the development of reading proficiency based on oral-aural skills.

This text is the end-product of several years of work and has benefited from the labors of many members and former members of the FSI STaff. In its present form it was prepared under the supervision of Dr. Samual A. Brown, who has had overall responsibility for the arrangement of situational material and for the organization and presentation of structural features. Particular credit for the dialogs and much of the drill material goes Mrs. Ilse Christoph, Mrs. Christoph has been assisted by Mrs. Maria-Luise Bissonnette, Mr. Firedrich Lehmann, Mr. Gerhard Matzel, Mrs. Margarete Plischke and Mrs. Erika Quaid. A most valuable contribution was also made by Mrs. Quaid in preparing the major part of the typescript, assisted by Miss Genevieve Ducastel. The project has been a cooperative venture, however, and all members of the German staff have contributed freely the fruit of their classroom experience and the gifts of their imagination and insights

Introduction

Aim

It is the aim of the course to provide the student with a useful control of the structure of the spoken language and of a basic vocabulary which meets at least some of the specialized needs of the Foreign Service. After completion of the basic course the Foreign Service Officer should be able to make limited practical use of the language in his official duties and social obligations. He will furthermore have the means, given the proper surroundings and personal motivation, for continued rapid and efficient development of proficiency.

Materials

The materials in this first volume of the text are organized into twelve lessons or units. Each unit contains a set of basic sentences for memorization. These are in the form of a dialog based on one or sometimes two specific situations in which a person might find himself in Germany. Notes to the basic sentences are provided as necessary to clarify occasional difficulties in vocabulary and idiom and to provide additional background on some cultural features unfamiliar to Americans. Notes on pronuciation are included in each of the first eight units. Phonlogical features, which have been found to be particularly difficult for American students are here presented with explanations and pronunciation practice drills. The notes on grammar in each unit single out those structural features illustrated in the basic sentences which are appropriate for systematic consideration at that stage in the substituting specific items in fixed sentence frames. They are intended to build habits of associations, so that in a given syntactic environment the appropriate grammatical form automatically comes to mind. As the German Vocabulary is all familiar, no English equivalents are given in these drills. Variation drills provide for the manipulation of larger syntactic patterns. In each group a model sentence, underscored, serves as a guide. Associated with it are additional sentences incorporating the same syntactic pattern but in which most of the individual word items have been replaced. Egnlsih equivalents are given to serve as cues for recall of the German variant sentences. Vocabulary drills provide both practice in the use of new vocabulary items and also allow for manipulation of sentence elements whose particular form and arrangement depends upon their association with that vocabulary item. The manipulation of both variation and vocabulary drills depends on teh use of English equivalents. Specific translation drills are also provided, however. In most cases they present the material of the basic dialog in the form of a narrative. They thus provide content review ot the basic sentences and practice in the transformation from active dialog to descriptive narration. The response drills are question and answer drills on the situations of the basic dialogs. Conversation practice and additional situations in outline bridge the gap to free conversation with small pieces of supplemenary dialog for acting out and situations providing for a freer play of the student's imagination. The finder list in each unit notes all new vocabulary which has been presented.

Method and Procedure

This is a course in Spoken German; the forms and patterns of the language are intentionally colloquial. The emphasis in instruction is everywhere on speech, and an indispensable component of the learning process is the voice of a tutor, or instructor, whose native language is German. On no account should the student attempt to use these materials without either a native instructor or recordings of a native instructor's voice. The method of instruction incorporates guided imitation, repetition, memorization, pattern practices, and conversation.

Working under the supervision of a linguist the tutor's role is to serve as a model for speech and to guide the student to accurate imitation by constant repetition and correction. The student's job is to watch and listen to the tutor carefully and to imitate as exactly as he can the sounds which he hears. He must be prepared for constant correction and repetition. Each time however the instructor will give him a model to follow by repeating the item first. The student should never attempt to read from his text but should always wait until he hears the word or utternace as the tutor speaks it for him. As far as possible he should leave his book closed during the presentation of new dialog material and keep his eyes on the tutor. Students will be asked to repeat in chorus and individually and will be expected to repeat many, many times, even when their imitation has been good and accurate. Only by constant repetition after an authentic model for speech can habitual fluent and accurate reproduction of the sounds and forms of the foreign language by achieved.

The basic sentences are preceded by "build-ups" giveing the component parts of the utterance separately. Each new item which is introduced appears first as a build-up. The tutor will ask the students to repeat the build-ups seperately first, then combined into larger units and finally the complete new sentence or utterance. The larger units and finally the complete new sentence or utterance. The basic sentences are sub-divided into numbered sections, each to be treated as a unit, repeated in chorus and individually, with and with-out build-ups, until the students' imitation is satisfactory. Then a new section may be begun. The time required to cover each section in this way will differ widely depending on the size and ability of the class. After acceptable imitation and accurate pronunciation has been achieved in one or more sections they are assigned for memorization outside of class or repeated in class until memorized. The student should be able to give either the German sentence or its English equivalent on request or swithc form one to the other and back again. The tutor will drill by repeating each sentence for each student in the class, then by giving each student a different sentence, repeating it for him first, and finally asking the student to recite the sentences in order, the first student the first sentence, the second student the second sentence, etc., without receiving a cue from the instructor. Repetition outside of class, preferably using recorded materials as a guide, should be continued to the point of overlearning. The student should not only be able to give the correct German sentence immediately upon hearing an English equivalent, at random selection, he should also be able to give the correct German cue. As a final step the students are expected to act out the basic dialog in entirety from memory, with the tutor or with other students. Only when the basic sentences have been mastered to this extent can they be considered to provide an adequate basis for control of the spoken language. It should be noted at this point that the English text accompanying the basic sentences is not primarily a translation but rather a set of conversational equivalents. Many apparent discrepancies will be found if the student, or the tutor, looks for word-for-word correspondence between the English and German text. It does not exist. Rather, in such and such a situation this is what is said in German and this is what is said in English.