German for the English; No. I. First Reading Book. Easy Poems, with Interlinear Translations

Opening a book in a foreign language, the Student is horrified by the many strange words that meet his eyes: how can he remember them all? Yet he may be told that "Language is one nearly related to his own"; that, of course, most of these words are not "strangers" to him, but old disguised acquaintances, old friends with a slight change in facial features. If so, how useful is it for the Disciple to have Cicero at the elbow to tell him what facial features have changed, what kind of disguise it is, removing which, he can recognize the old faces that he has known since he was in the nursery! This is what we are trying to do in the first part of this book, which deals with the “Sound Changes” that words undergo when they change from German to English. We give the student a few rules by which he can convert a huge number of German words to English; thus leading him, according to the philosophical method of Pestalozzi and Bacon, "from the known to the unknown." This method has been successfully applied in teaching the syntax of languages, since the basic principles of grammar are the same for all languages: why, then, it should not be applied to the etymology of a language, especially one that is so close to the language. Is the student's native language like German to English? Again, when teaching a language as rich in composition and derivatives as German, it is important to explain the exact meaning of the prefixes and affixes that are derived from words. And this is what we tried to do in the second part "Prefixes and Affixes". This book is a collection of lessons repeatedly given by authors who, having taught this plan over the years, have more confidently presented it to the public. The poems are arranged gradually, their complexity increases. The last two, "The Luck of Edenhall" and "The Ring of Poly crates", are not interspersed with English, but are accompanied by an almost literal translation on the opposite page and footnotes.