GERMAN PROSE COMPOSITION
By CARL W. J. OSTHAUS, Professor of German, Indiana University; and ERNEST H. BIERMANN, Instructor in German, Indiana University.
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This book is designed for the second and third years in college, and for the third and fourth years in the secondary school. The work is based on consecutive prose, and is intended to develop rapidly the student's sense of independence. The selections are really new and fresh, and offer a wide range of material, being anecdotal and historical, taken from Germanic folklore, literature, and real life.
¶ A portion of the elementary exercises are made up of three parts: a German selection, a set of questions in German, and an English paraphrase of the preceding German selection for translation into German. The German selection forms the basis of the work which follows, and should be studied thoroughly before the translation is worked out by the class. In the elementary part most of the selections are preceded by a statement of the grammatical principles involved, thus making it easy for the instructor to assign certain portions of grammar for review.
¶ The questions in German, which are intended to be answered in German, afford excellent practice work in the transposition of tenses or persons, and the changing from direct to indirect discourse, etc. As the selections increase in length, the questions are omitted, and in the latter portion only English material of higher grade is given.
¶ Copious footnotes throughout the book provide the needful suggestions and refer the student to sections of the digest of syntax which follows the text. This digest, which is intended chiefly for the guidance of the inexperienced, is to be supplemented by the grammar with which the student is familiar. There are full German-English and English-German vocabularies at the end of the book.