I just reached my second language “milestone” of the summer: tonight I took the “final” for Theological German. The word “final” is in quotes for two reasons. First, Peter Bach (our professor) emphasized that it is by no means the “final” test of our German; it is just one more step in the journey. And also, because it was like no other final exam I have ever taken. We were given a German text, a decades-old article about source criticism in Old Testament scholarship, two weeks in advance. We were allowed to translate through it (or “render” it, since there’s no such thing as translation, Peter says) on our own or in groups. We even ran over any questions that we had about this “final” text in the classes leading up to the last day of class. When it came down to go time, we would go around the classroom and would have to spot-render a sentence from the text without looking at our notes. He let us bring our notes to class, though, and look at them briefly before our turn. My final exam sentence?

3. Das in Jüngster Vergangenheit sich durchsetzende Stadium einer geschichtlichen und religionsgeschichtlichen Neuorientierung.

The “3″ refers to the third of three stages of research history according to Kittel (“So hätten wir nach Kittel also drei Stadien der Forschungsgeschichte zu unterscheiden:”). My wooden rendering?

3. The stage asserting in the recent past of a historical and religious-historical re-orientation.

I’m not sure I know what that means, but hey, at least I translated… I mean, rendered it. If I had to guess, I’m thinking the author is referring to some shift in recent scholarship, a reorientation in thinking about religious history and history in general. Perhaps Old Testament history. That was the whole final. I chose to read the German aloud, even though that wasn’t required. Then I said the exact same rendering I wrote just now. That was it. Done. Finis.

Christina pointed out to me that this is the fifth language that I have studied, not including English. It sounds impressive, but it’s not really. I’m only fluent in one language and we’ve already seen in an earlier post how dusty my Greek is, which is my next best language. I’ve also studied Hebrew, Spanish, and French to some extent. In this regard, I feel like I’m a little qualified to assess my learning experience in this German class.

Peter’s approach was to spend a little bit of time on grammar (the first two weeks) and then dive into reading German texts. We did some easy ones to start and then jumped into Helmut Ziefle’s Modern Theological German: A Reader and Dictionary. We were required to purchase a dictionary and April Wilson’s German Quickly: A Grammar for Reading German. April Wilson’s text might be good for a class that is going through her book as an assigned reading, but it was used in our class merely as a reference. As a reference book, Wilson’s book is terrible. I cannot judge the information contained within the book, but it is not easy to use if you want to look up a specific grammatical issue. So I purchased Martin Durrell’s Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage, which I found much more helpful. I decided on the unabridged Oxford Duden German Dictionary. The dictionary is great but since we did not memorize vocabulary, I found it extremely time-consuming to translate through German texts as a beginner. I did find two really stellar websites that helped this handicap: the LEO online German-English dictionary and its companion site Canoo.net for grammar, morphology, inflection, etc. By using the online tools, things went much quicker, giving me more time to think about patterns that I was seeing in grammar and vocabulary.

Many people were skeptical of Peter’s teaching approach from the start of the class. Some people came around. Some people were frustrated with the class. Personally, I am ambivalent about it. I learn well with others and the course was essentially a German reading course with a small, friendly group. We had a grand old time giving our pitiful English renderings of German texts together. I don’t think I have ever had a class that has laughed so much. But I do know there was something missing. I am still operating at a basic level. Sure, I can understand a complicated scholarly German article after spending two weeks on it. But I still need the dictionary and I don’t have verbal forms memorized (except for the easy-to-spot past participle).

The tension is: When you are starting from scratch, how much of one language can you teach people in ten weeks? What should you emphasize? If we spent more time on vocabulary and grammar, I might be ending the class feeling much less confident about being able to conquer “real” German texts. Though the course was lacking in some necessary items, it was a good learning experience for me overall. I learned the basics of German sentence structure, grammar, basic vocabulary, and how to use tools. I may take another German course someday, but for now I’m happy with the result. I’m planning on keeping up with it by reading book reviews from Review of Biblical Literature that are written in German. There is also a German reading group at Fuller that I might start attending. Here’s hoping that I didn’t just flush $1400 down the drain for no apparent reason!