Books published by publisher Templegate

There are many different ways to learn a foreign language. The ultimate aim of language learning is to understand, speak, read and write the foreign language with the same ease and efficiency as one's mother tongue. Practically all language courses are aimed at making progress in all four skills at once, to learn to read, to write, to speak and to understand the language all at the same time. In Cracking the Language Code, our approach is to keep each of the four skills as separate as possible. This book, which we call the 'IN' Course, is meant to be your first introduction to the German language. It concentrates on helping you to acquire the ability to read and understand written German and to translate from written German into English. There is at this stage no attempt whatsoever to enable you to write or speak German. Those are skills which you may decide to acquire after you have completed this book. After acquiring an IN-coming knowledge of German (a passive knowledge with the ability to read and understand the language), you may then decide to acquire and OUT-going knowledge of German (an active knowledge with the ability to write and speak the language). To those who feel this divorcing of the passive ability from the active ability is unnatural, this is what really happens when a child learns his own native language, understanding the language far ahead of his ability to use the forms and words he understands.