Brun Ugle wrote:If you can find several people who are interested, you can always start such a study group yourself, but I don’t think there has been much success with groups that have tried to follow a specific book before. People tend to drop in and out as their lives get busy or other things happen and then it falls apart.
Still, I think it could be fun to have some kind of group activity. Our Setswana group has meet-ups on Google Hangouts to discuss what we’ve learned. And some study groups have read novels together in a kind of book club.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen interlinear texts. Parallel texts are pretty easy to find in the more popular languages though. Are they not good enough?
Yeah, it's far easier to find paralel texts, but I think interlinear texts are much better, specially on more complicated senteces, where you can't make heads or tails of how the german sentence works even though you have the english translation right besides, all this would be made much easier on an interlinear translation in my opinion.
Seeing as there are no other study groups currently active I would like to see if people are interested in joining one, I don't know if this group is active enough to do something like that but I guess I lose nothing by at least proposing it.
Also, I think I need some help with my studies, so I guess I'll just post my doubts here since this seems like the proper place for discussing everything related to german:
I'm trying to read some of Hölderlin's poems with the help of a parallel text book and this the first poem I'm reading through:
An die junge Dichter
Lieben Brüder! es reift unsere Kunst vielleicht
Da den Jüngling gleich lange sie schon gegärt,
Bald zur stille der Schönheit;
Seid nur fromm, wie der Drieche war!
Liebt die Götter und denkt freundlich der Sterblichen!
Hasst den Rausch wie den Frost! lehrt und beschreibt nich!
Wenn der Meister euch ängstigt,
Fragt die grosse Natur um Rat!
Now, from verses 4 onwards it's pretty easy to understand what's going on since the sentences are pretty simple and straightforward, but the first 3 verses are confusing the hell out of me. Can anyone please explain me how you would go about trying to decode what's going on in there?