German Dictionaries & Grammars

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German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby aravinda » Fri Jun 09, 2017 1:12 am

I have recently started learning German. I already have few courses and grammars. I was wondering what suggestions fellow forum members would have for German dictionaries. I am not specifically thinking of online dictionaries but any suggestion is welcome: monolingual vs bilingual, for learners at different levels, dictionary apps etc. When you are at it, you may suggest your favorite grammar (for different levels) as well (Though I am not in need of a bigger grammar right now).

*I could not find a similar topic elsewhere on this forum and I assumed this is the correct place to post mine. (Being relatively new here, I may be wrong). Please let know if I am mistaken.

EDIT:
After posting this, I saw Speakeasy's post Selecting a Dictionary which in my opinion gives sound advice (without being specific to a particular language).
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5966
Last edited by aravinda on Sat Jun 10, 2017 12:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby smallwhite » Fri Jun 09, 2017 2:28 am

I don't know if you didn't see these resource lists or if they didn't meet your requirement of "suggestions":

Forum > sub-forum Language Programs and Resources > Sticky thread The Master List of Resources >
* Dictionaries & Reference > German
* German > Grammar
* German > Reference

and

Forum > Study Groups > German group
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Re: German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby aravinda » Fri Jun 09, 2017 3:32 am

Thanks, smallwhite. Of course. I had seen those lists but I had completely forgotten them. But they are just lists, I was expecting "suggestions" with a bit more information on the usefulness of a particular resource.
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Re: German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby aokoye » Fri Jun 09, 2017 4:01 am

In terms of grammars, did you mean grammar text/workbooks or general textbooks? I know that some people use "grammar" in relation to a book differently than I do and when referring to Latin and Greek (in English) what would be called a textbook for a language like German is called a grammar.
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Re: German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby mcthulhu » Tue Jun 13, 2017 9:56 pm

For grammar - I don't know how much of a tool person you are, but maybe you might be interested in using a morphological analyzer as a grammatical reference. There's one for German (among others) at https://sourceforge.net/projects/hfst/f ... nsducers/; you need to have Helsinki Finite State Technology (HFST) installed to use it. It should run under either Windows or Linux. I don't know if this transducer would have been included in the existing lists of resources in this forum. The tool is free, anyway.

Sample output from running it in interactive mode, via hfst-lookup german.hfst.ol:

> schien
schien scheinen<+V><1><Sg><Past><Ind> 0.000000
schien scheinen<+V><3><Sg><Past><Ind> 0.000000

so it's sort of like one of those "500 German Verbs" books or whatever, except that it covers all parts of speech.

A bit of explanation - A finite state transducer is a compact representation of a network of patterns for translating one set of strings into another set of strings, and an FST for morphological parsing encodes both a lexicon and grammatical rules. FSTs, in addition to being very fast, are also bidirectional, so you could also start with scheinen<+V><3><Sg><Past><Ind> and get schien back as the specified inflected form.
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Re: German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby aravinda » Wed Jun 14, 2017 12:46 pm

aokoye wrote:In terms of grammars, did you mean grammar text/workbooks or general textbooks? I know that some people use "grammar" in relation to a book differently than I do and when referring to Latin and Greek (in English) what would be called a textbook for a language like German is called a grammar.


Yes, the word "grammar" has been used to mean different things. I meant a grammar that describes morphology, syntax etc for L2 learners (with or without exercises). In fact, now I have got a few but still, would like to know your favorites.

By the way, I understand that there is another difference in the usage of the linguistic term "grammar" in the US and Europe. In the US the term "grammar" usually includes phonology but generally not so in Europe. Obviously, this is a rather broad generalization and I can be wrong.
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Re: German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jun 14, 2017 1:16 pm

aravinda wrote:
aokoye wrote:In terms of grammars, did you mean grammar text/workbooks or general textbooks? I know that some people use "grammar" in relation to a book differently than I do and when referring to Latin and Greek (in English) what would be called a textbook for a language like German is called a grammar.


Yes, the word "grammar" has been used to mean different things. I meant a grammar that describes morphology, syntax etc for L2 learners (with or without exercises). In fact, now I have got a few but still, would like to know your favorites.

By the way, I understand that there is another difference in the usage of the linguistic term "grammar" in the US and Europe. In the US the term "grammar" usually includes phonology but generally not so in Europe. Obviously, this is a rather broad generalization and I can be wrong.


'Hammer's German Grammar and Usage' and the 'Practicing' exercise book
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Re: German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby aokoye » Wed Jun 14, 2017 2:47 pm

aravinda wrote:
aokoye wrote:In terms of grammars, did you mean grammar text/workbooks or general textbooks? I know that some people use "grammar" in relation to a book differently than I do and when referring to Latin and Greek (in English) what would be called a textbook for a language like German is called a grammar.


Yes, the word "grammar" has been used to mean different things. I meant a grammar that describes morphology, syntax etc for L2 learners (with or without exercises). In fact, now I have got a few but still, would like to know your favorites.
I like German in Review, the Practice Makes Perfect series, and Hueber's Essential Grammar of German. Their other books are also good and I've als heard good things about the grammar books from Schubert Verlag. If you read through the German Group thread there are lengthy reviews of a few grammar books (for the sake of time I would just do a search for grammar within that thread).

By the way, I understand that there is another difference in the usage of the linguistic term "grammar" in the US and Europe. In the US the term "grammar" usually includes phonology but generally not so in Europe. Obviously, this is a rather broad generalization and I can be wrong.

Within the discipline of linguistics this is actually not at all true - not in the US at least. Of the top of my head that also isn't true for publications aimed at language learners in the US and I don't think I've ever heard a teacher lump phonology together with syntax and morphology together. I know that many of the Routledge grammar books (which are also good) have a very small overview of the phonology of the language in question but a. those are published in the UK and b. there's a preface to those sections that says that teaching phonetics isn't the primary, or even secondary, aim of the books.
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Re: German Dictionaries & Grammars

Postby Speakeasy » Wed Jun 14, 2017 3:20 pm

Grammars for Beginners: General Advice
The following reflects my view on the selection and use of grammars by Beginners. When it comes to choosing a grammar, my experiences have led me to the paradoxical conclusion that, for the Beginner, “less is truly more”, and my recommendation is that one should abstain from acquiring an elaborate/advanced grammar before the Intermediate level of language study. Why so? Well, the examples employed in more advanced works for illustrating a point of grammar typically: (1) involve complex sentences which are simply too challenging for the Beginner, (2) use vocabulary well beyond the Beginner’s level, causing him to divert his attention to a dictionary where he will be confronted with multiple meanings and nuances of a word as well as a brief and inadequate illustration of idiomatic expressions, all of which could easily have the perverse effect of leaving the Beginner perplexed and frustrated as opposed to illuminated, and (3) contain additional elements of grammar which are not readily apparent to the Beginner, but which are essential to one’s understanding of the example and the particular rule of grammar presently under discussion. Furthermore, advanced grammars, by their very nature, will tend to provide every possible nuance of a basic concept, replete with examples, thereby dragging the poor, unprepared novice “down the rabbit hole”, as it were.

For a “popular” language like German, there are simply too many very good resources available; so much so, that it is a challenging task to limit oneself to one or two recommendations. Nevertheless, I would recommend that a Beginner accompany his regular study materials with “German Verbs & Essentials of Grammar”, 2nd edition, by Charles J. James, published by McGraw-Hill. There are probably fifty alternatives to this work, each of which is just as good as the former. Later, once you have a solid footing at the Intermediate level, you might consider acquiring a copy of “Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage”, just about any edition, published by Routledge. Rightly or wrongly, it is often cited as “the” English-language reference for German.

Reading Grammars for Pleasure?
I vaguely recall a discussion thread wherein some members -- myself included -- confided that they read grammars for pleasure.

By the way, I concur with all of the recommendations preceding my own.
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