Talk:German/Level I

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

[edit] Lesson 1	Wie heißt du? Hellos/Goodbyes, alphabet, nominative case pronouns and articles, names, "Wie geht's?" and questions.
[edit] Lesson 2	Freizeit Sports and activities, preferences, telling time, and times, dates and seasons.
[edit] Lesson 3	Essen Introduction to food, food-related verbs, intro to modals & möchten, kein-words, polite/formal conversation language, and "Schmeckt's?"
[edit] Review 1	Review of Lessons 1-3
[edit] Lesson 4	Kleidung Articles of clothing, shopping, describing clothes, and colors.
[edit] Lesson 5	Familien Family members, possessives, describing people, and expressing favorites.
[edit] Lesson 6	Schule School subjects, a description of German schools, basic vocabulary in school.
[edit] Review 2	Review of Lessons 4-6
[edit] Lesson 7	Die Fete Dative case articles and pronouns, giving gifts, invitations to parties, snack food, and es gibt.

Possible reformat of the contents? --Boit 00:00, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Creating Review one

Why not combine the test's from all the first 3 lesson and use it as a huge review...
A simple past and edit. --Andrewcool 02:36, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Look of the contents pages

The number of images on the contents page (especially this level) is a bit excessive. In Firefox, the castle photo squashes the text and the three bits of clipart as well as levels 1, 2 and 3 together. However, in Internet Explorer, it looks even worse with a large gap of white space. I propose losing the clipart (you never see clipart in the contents pages of textbooks)

That's fine by me. Actually, the white space was there before I put the clipart in, and I thought that it would liven up the page (I use IE). If we reformat the page as you suggest, could we add the clipart back in? Of course, it would be nice if we could get actual photos, or a good artist... Anyway, would you happen to know if there's a way to make the castle photo some kind of background? - SamE 00:40, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Activity

I was just curious about how active this book actually is. I am interested in using this German book to assist me in my learning but as of now it does not appear to have much activity in the building of it.

Will the book have added pages soon? --Mitchowen 16:58, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I don't know how active this book is either, as I just started working on it myself. However, I for one plan on updating rather frequently, adding vocabulary and writing problems and review pages, and whatever else I can get around to. --MasterSheep 22:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation

I think information on how to pronounce the phrases given (for example the hellos and goodbyes) would be good... Sotakeit 18:54, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I think the reviews are going to have the pronuctions. So we don't need them in the main lessons...German Man92 16:56, 3 Feb. 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Long 'S'

There are several occurances of the long 's' in titles throughout this book, but always as |, which to me just looks plain ugly. Why not use ſ (Unicode U+017F) instead?

This: A Beginners Course in German

rather than this: A Beginner| Cour|e in German --Xeon 00:36, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

It isn't long s, in the schwaben alt font "s" is "ſ", and "|" is "s" --German Men92 20:43, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

1st: there isn't a "|" in the german language anymore. 2nd: the schaben alt font is not representative for the german language. 3rd: why should we use the schaben alt font? 4th: i did't know the | until today (I'm german) -- 213.39.233.138 02:27, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Actually the schwaben font in very representative for the german language. It was widely used in German, until hitler took over and called it "jewish", and I don't want to use the long s, I want to use the normal s, use requires me useing "|". --German Men92 02:34, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

"Actually the schwaben font in very representative for the german language". No, it was representative until 16th century. "it was replaced by the fraktur as the most-used German typeface". OK, we can use something like [1] but A Beginner| Cour|e in German is an ugly typo (except for you) :) --213.39.233.138 17:07, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Just a short info about the "ſ". This letter never used to occur in the end of a syllable, hence "Beginner's" would always have been written with an "s" (indicating the end of a syllable was the point of using two kinds of "s" in the first place - e.g. in "Häschen" - not "Häſchen"). As for the "ſ" in todays German - it is non-existant. Thus, I would suggest removing it all together. After all, learning a historical version of German won't be of much help to a beginner after all. --Martin, Eichendorffschule 23:00, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

• We shouldn't use special fonts for this purpose. It's okay in the PDF version, but here most people are just going to see "A Beginner| Cour|e in German".--Aleron235 19:25, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Where are the tests?

Why are there no tests present on this page? I would like to learn German using this text, but I find it most difficult without the tests. Please post them if possible.