J.D. Reiner's Writings

Introduction

As my first piece of writing, I’d like to make some comments about the intensive summer course in German that I’m taking at my university. Why am I studying German? It’s required for my doctoral program in the study of religion, so I don’t have a choice in the matter.

However, I want to study it because many of the greatest church historians were Germans. Most people who know the field understand this already. Bauer, Bultmann, Harnack, Strauss, Schmidt, Wellhausen, and many others come to mind. Understandably, they usually wrote their books in their native language. What are my thoughts about the German language? I’ll list three things that I find easy and three things that I find difficult about the language.

What I Find Easy about German

The first easy thing is that lots of the words are similar to English words, such as halt in English and halt in German. The second is that the definite and indefinite articles help me to understand the functions of nouns in clauses and sentences. In this respect, German reminds me of ancient Greek, which also changes the forms of articles and nouns depending on their grammatical functions. The third is that there are helpful online dictionaries that give every possible meaning and function for any words that I don’t know, which is a big number.

What I Find Hard about German

First of all, the fact that German combines words together to make bigger words is tough. Sometimes, I need to split words into smaller parts and look them up individually. As if that weren’t bad enough, the meanings that I put together sometimes don’t even match the way that the author is trying to use the word. Second, the word order in German can be confusing because it varies more than English does. Third, the comma rules in German are difficult to learn. German doesn’t always put commas in the same places that English does, and so I often have to ignore comma placement when trying to discern the meanings of different clauses.

Conclusion

Obviously, this wasn’t a very long article, but I wanted to write something for my first post on this website. The important thing for me is to learn the language well enough to read books and articles in the field of church history. For that purpose, this short course seems to be working well!