Maybe I'm being too pedantic, but I found some errors on the first few pages and am wondering about the accuracy of the rest.
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/: "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996, i.e., since before much of this book's audience was born. "beeinflüssen" should be "beeinflussen".
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender-no...: Not an error of German per se, but I find "memorizing the gender of every noun is not particularly important" and "It is recommended that, as you learn the nouns you choose to memorize, you learn each noun with its definite article" contradictory and confusing.
On the same page: "All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are feminine." Counterexamples I came up with in a minute or so: der Brei, das Allerlei, das Benzin. The reason is that in these cases -ei and -in are not suffixes in the same sense as they are in the common case illustrated by the authors' examples, but a beginner would not be able to tell.
This feels like it could be a better resource with more attention to small details.
This book seems to be content grandfathered in since a 1975 course and thus will likely have lots of obsolete material, despite being revised and compiled into newer editions as the most major change was likely 1995 as it says in the below quote, which would likely explain the pre-1996 "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" spelling. There was a 3rd edition in 2001 but they probably didn't manage to get to the issue.
It is now a "open textbook was launched publicly on 22 October 2014 and is revised continually" so I would imagine they would be very pleased to see your corrections.
>The second edition of this textbook was published in 1995 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, copyright Howard Martin, primarily edited by Sue Tyson. Earlier versions apparently date back at least to a University of Wisconsin-Extension Independent Study course guide titled “A Guide to Reading German” “revised and expanded” by Howard Martin and published in 1975.
> I would imagine they would be very pleased to see your corrections.
The page in question was last revised in 2017, 21 years after the reform. Clicking on one of the most recent revisions, https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/common-da-word..., revised on December 10, 2018, I see that they spell "nass" as "naß". If they missed this, I'd say they don't care.
I certainly don't care enough to go through all occurrences of ß in this book and point out to them which ones to fix.
It's not that simple, I guess this refers to things like "Mongolei", "Spielerei" etc. where -ei will also never be a syllable on its own. You'll have to put a lot more context in for a rule like this.
The negation of a rule or of qualities is an effective language acquisition technique: a tree is not a bush, they are different in X ways; a book is not a magazine, they are different in X ways.
"Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996,
Which many adults I know continue to thumb their noses at, to this day (in personal communication, at least). In any case, arguably one needs to be aware of the pre-RSR spelling conventions to have a solid grip on the language as a whole. So I would prefer a reference that made us aware of both variants, actually.
As to feminine nouns -- good call. It's a difficult task to put together reference materials that are both comprehensive (and approachable) and obsessively accurate.
> In any case, arguably one needs to be aware of the pre-RSR spelling conventions to have a solid grip on the language as a whole.
Absolutely, but I'd argue that the first example in the book is not the best place to put this. Learners will at some point encounter pre-RSR texts (or personal communications that don't care about RSR or other standard language features), but much of what they are likely to encounter at the beginning will be newer texts that use the current conventions.
As someone who worked as a professional writer for many years I never understood why that reform was so inconsistent. After all it was supposed to simplify spelling. So why not go all the way and eradicate the 'ß' like they did in Switzerland. And this is just one of many examples.
The standard argument is that some words with different meanings (and pronunciations!) can only be distinguished by ss/ß in writing, e.g. "Masse" (mass) vs. "Maße" (measures). The first one has a short "a" sound, the second one has a long "a" sound.
In Standard German ss and ß don't have distinct pronunciations.
That was one of the goals of the spelling reform to make the use of ß more consistent and use simpler rules for it. Exactly because there is no difference in pronounciation between ss and ß.
You’re right, they are pronounced the same. What I was actually thinking about was the different pronunciations of the vowel before the ss/ß. In the word “Schoß” for example the ß tells you the the vowel is long and not short as it would be in the word “schoss”.
So what I’m trying to say is that s/ss/ß have distinct use cases which follow consistent rules.
> So why not go all the way and eradicate the 'ß' like they did in Switzerland.
Cultural identity and pride in one's lingual heritage play a part too. As a Dutchman, I like the German ß. Nothing conveys the notion of a foreign country better than another language and a differing orthography.
The ß even has a proper capital these days: ẞ. While no word ever begins with ẞ, you do need it when capitalising a whole word — e.g., on a sign.
Your issue with the esset I think is a little pedantic as it's really just a typography issue.
However the point about knowing noun articles is extremely important, and the more you stick with it from the beginning the easier it is when you are learning the different cases later on.
Good example for French, I wasn't aware of that one. I know that "image" is supposedly the only -age word in French that is not masculine. (Which BTW is confusing for French learners from German, since German adopted a bunch of French -age words, but as feminine words like die Garage.)
Anyway, just above the example in question, the authors manage to point to a rule that "usually" (their emphasis) holds, so they could just have written "usually" here as well. They could also have pointed out that the suffixes they list have the effect they state when added to a root that is a word in its own right: Bäcker-Bäckerei, heiter-Heiterkeit, Land-Landschaft etc. though admittedly this might add too much complexity this early on.
I learned German in Austria and I was taught a handful of words which we use a different article here as compared to in Germany. My recollection is that most of these words either were commercial, like Nutella, or loan words coming from other languages (e.g. not every loan word is neutral).
But while I did eventually get my C1, my German isn't great so I don't want to claim any expertise.
An example that comes to mind is butter. It's feminine (die Butter), but in some dialects, it's masculine (der Butter). There are maps for several other words at http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-5/f15a-f/, but I'd take them with a grain of salt. The region I grew up in doesn't really match what these maps say about it.
Oh, I know certain people in Bavaria calling "das Butter", suspicious people no doubt! Everybody knows it is "die Butter" with an option to settle for "der Butter"!
Nutella is a pathological example. It's a running gag among German speakers that they cannot figure out its gender. The discussion usually ends when someone suggests something like "das Nutellaglas" ("the jar of Nutella"), i.e. building a compound word so that the other part of the word imposes its gender.
A well-known example is "die/das Tram" (rather a Helvetism; this words means the same as in English; the more usual German word is "die Straßenbahn). In Standard German, "Tram" is considered as an abbreviation of "die Trambahn" - so it is female. In South Germany and Switzerland, "das Tram" is used.
Nutella is a proper noun and also a loanword, I was expecting native common noun pairs. (Btw the issue exists in French too for this word, and a few others like Wifi or Gameboy)
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/introduction/: "Einfluß" and "Zusammenfluß" have officially been spelled "Einfluss" and "Zusammenfluss" since the reform of 1996, i.e., since before much of this book's audience was born. "beeinflüssen" should be "beeinflussen".
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/noun-gender-no...: Not an error of German per se, but I find "memorizing the gender of every noun is not particularly important" and "It is recommended that, as you learn the nouns you choose to memorize, you learn each noun with its definite article" contradictory and confusing.
On the same page: "All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are feminine." Counterexamples I came up with in a minute or so: der Brei, das Allerlei, das Benzin. The reason is that in these cases -ei and -in are not suffixes in the same sense as they are in the common case illustrated by the authors' examples, but a beginner would not be able to tell.
This feels like it could be a better resource with more attention to small details.