Category: Learning Theological German website

The Top 13 Reasons To Study Theological German

1. You want to gain competency quickly so you can focus on other things you are more passionate about.
2. It is possible to learn to read German with some degree of competency in six weeks if you are disciplined about it.
3. You do not want to just be adequate, you want to be competent so that translating is not stressful.
4. Approximately 1/4 of all the theological journals at major English-speaking religion libraries are in German.
5. English theological discourse has been greatly influenced by German vocabulary.
6. There are some great Germans worth reading in their native tongue.  Luther, Nietzsche, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Ratzinger come to mind.
7. Knowing German will come in handy in the future in surprising ways–while traveling, in an emergency, and while enjoying music, foreign films, and restaurants.
8. You want to establish consistent, effective, efficient, and productive study habits.  If you can learn German, you can learn most anything.
9. You are grateful for the abilities you have been given and the appropriate response is doing your best with them.
10. Learning German will make you a better professor and writer which will one day help the next generation of students.
11. You can pass on to others what you have learned in the hard work of language study.
12. You are grateful to others who have sacrificed that you might have time to study.
13. You want to be able to translate texts with your friend who is also studying theological German.
14. Karl Barth wrote in his “Letter to American Christians” in December 1942.  “I should like to add as an urgent wish: he [the person who wants to be helpful to European churches] must know our language a bit, be able to read our books and papers himself, if necessary, to follow our worship services and other gatherings with some understanding and perhaps be able to speak with us a little in our own tongue.”  Karl Barth, The Church and the War (trans. Antonia H. Froendt; Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1944), 45.

The Top 9 Tips for Studying Theological German

1. Have confidence in the book or resource you have chosen.  If you go through it, you will learn a lot.
2. Study on a routine.  For example, from 9:30 am to noon work through the grammar book at the coffee shop.  From 1:00 pm to 3:30 study vocabulary and walk in the neighborhood.
3. Get 8 hours of sleep. If you are sleepy, caffeine is not that helpful.  Take a 20 minute power nap or 1 1/2 hour rejuvenating nap, then try again (with caffeine if you like).
4. Study German first.  Then check your email and tidy up the house.
5. Beware of the internet.  Everything on the internet is more interesting than German grammar.
6. Don’t do questions or translation when you do not have the answers or English translation.  Often book publishers and authors have all of the answers for the exercises and are glad to provide them if you contact them.  It is too frustrating to do questions and not have the answers to check them by.
7. Language experience helps.  If you have it, great.  If not, this will help you in future language learning.
8. Have deadlines. Make a schedule.
9. There is always fog in language-learning.  In other words, you will always be slightly confused.  Push through it.

Theological German: Advice and Resources Homepage

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What other advice do you have about staying motivated for learning theological German?

Note from August 2021: This webpage was created in 2009 and has only been sporadically updated since then.

Tips on German Reading Exams:

1. Talk to other students who have taken the exam at your school.
2. Take into the exam a very good dictionary (See Advice on Choosing a Dictionary) and the dictionary in Modern Theological German (See Textbooks and Grammars).
3. You probably do not have time to write your translation under the German words and then later write your translation on your paper. So directly write your translation on a yellow pad.
4. Skip lines so you have room to make corrections.  Start each new sentence on a new line.
5. Use a Post-it Note to keep your place.  Put it at the end of the sentence.  When you have finished that sentence, move it to the end of the next sentence.
6. People have still been known to pass even if they do not finish the whole thing if what they have finished is well done.
7. If your translation of a certain sentence is unclear to you, leave your rough translation and move on to the next sentence.  Perhaps when you have translated the whole section, that sentence will become more clear from the context.  Leave time at the end for going over your whole translation and smoothing it out.
8. Many advisors will choose a text you are somewhat familiar with if you ask.  Bonhoeffer’s Life Together / Gemeinsames Leben is a popular choice.
9. Many programs accept a completed German academic course in lieu of taking the test.
10. Standardization in language learning has grown increasingly common with the adoption of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in 2001.  However, this has not yet been adopted by many religion departments as the criteria for their evaluation.  Therefore, levels of acceptable proficiency vary widely.  See Deutsche Welle (sponsored by the German government) for a brief description of the CEF levels:

• A-1 is reached with about 75 hours of German study.
• A-2.1 about 150 hours.
• A-2.2 about 225 hours.
• B 1.1 about 300 hours.
• B 1.2 about 400 hours.

Sample Guidelines:

See for example the description of language exams in the Duke Divinity School “Doctor of Theology” (Th.D.) program.  See Th.D. Course of Study and  Th.D. Language Guidelines (pdf)

For more about my program, see the Th.D. / Ph.D. category page at my blog.

 

Sample Exam 1:

For the test, you have two hours to translate two pages of a journal article with a dictionary.

Sample exam 1 is from an article in the journal Die Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche. (Duke University Library link to this journal).

Otfried Hofius, “Gemeindeleitung und Kirchenleitung nach dem Zeugnis des Neuen Testaments: Eine Skizze,” Die Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 103 (2006):185-186.

Download copy of sample German Exam.pdf

Sample Exam 2:

Matthias Konradt, Gericht und Gemeinde: Eine Studie zur Bedeutung und Funktion von Gerichtsaussagen im Rahmen der Paulinischen Ekklesiologie und Ethik im 1 Thess und 1 Kor (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003), 521-522.

Google Books tells you that the most common terms and phrases in this book on its overview page.  Those terms might be worth memorizing as an example of current theological New Testament work in German.

Sample Exam 3:

Jörg Frey, “‘… dass sie meine Herrlichkeit schauen’ (Joh 17.24) Zu Hintergrund, Sinn und Funktion der johanneischen Rede von der δoξα Jesu” New Testament Studies 54 (2008): 395-397.

Sample Exam 4:

A selection from:

Ernst Käsemann, “Gottesgerechtigkeit bei Paulus,” Die Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 58 (1961): 367-78.

The translation is available at:

Ernst Käsemann, “‘The Righteousness of God’ in Paul,” in New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 168-82.

Theological German: Advice and Resources Homepage

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What other advice do you have about passing graduate program German reading exams?

Note from August 2021: This webpage was created in 2009 and has only been sporadically updated since then.

Once you have finished working through a grammar such as April Wilson’s German Quickly, and perhaps even before you are finished, you will want to attempt to translate theological German.

1. Attempt some passages from a German translation of the Bible.  There is lots of common theological vocabulary in Romans 1:1-7.  See Luther’s translation Roemer 1:1-7 (Luther Bibel 1545) or a contemporary German translation Roemer 1:1-7 (Hoffnung für Alle) You can access the entire Bible for free easily in either of these translations at www.biblegateway.com.
2. Find something you would like to translate.  Theological preferences vary widely!  Find something you are interested in.
3. If possible, find the text in both German and English so you can check your translations.
4. It is nice to have variety.  Plus variety helps you improve the breadth of what you can translate.

• Helmut Ziefle’s book Modern Theological German has selections from the Bible, Martin Luther, Adolf Schlatter, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Helmut Thielicke, Hans Walter Wolff, Peter Stuhlmacher, Helmut Class, Dietrich Mendt, Theo Sorg, Gerhard Maier, and Rainer Riesner.  See my review of Ziefle’s book at Textbooks and Grammars 
• In the German reading course I took with other Duke University graduate students, we translated about a page from Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Hesse, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg, Heinz Politzer, Rainer Maria Rilke, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich von Schiller, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Barth, and Herbert Marcuse.  
• Luther Seminary’s introductory course includes readings from Bonhoeffer, Thielicke, Barth and Moltmann.
  
• Christopher Begg’s course at The Catholic University of America included readings from J. Michel, J. Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI–of course!), G. Fischer & M. Hoitschka, A. Ohler, S. Pfürtner, O. Keel, J. Betz, and B. Schüller.
  
• Karin Grundler-Whitacre’s course at Harvard Divinity School includes readings from Barth, Bonhoeffer, Hildegard von Bingen, Kant, Luther, Rahner, Schleiermacher, Soelle, and Tillich.
• Bonhoeffer’s Life Together / Gemeinsames Leben is a popular choice.  The page numbers of the German edition are clearly displayed in the English critical edition so you can compare.
• From a Duke New Testament student: “I was going to let you know that a fantastic book for NT students to translate is Martin Hengel’s Die vier Evanglien und das eine Evangelium von Jesus Christus. It is scholarly, relevant, a great book, and the English translation is readily available (The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ; warning, though, the English skips some sentences).”

 

Sample translation practice:

 

We have access through Duke University Library to the online digital edition of the new edition of the Church Dogmatics at The Digital Karl Barth Library.

Here is the link for Duke students who have NetID and Password.

There are 8,000 pages in the Church Dogmatics.  For recommendations on what to read from the Church Dogmatics, see Ben Myers’s blog post The best bits of Barth’s dogmatics: or, how to read the CD on your holiday

Sample practice 1.

Here is a two-page section from the Church Dogmatics on “the church.”
German Translation Practice–Church Dogmatics by Barth – Section 62.doc (67.0K)

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Sample practice 2. 

Here is some more German translation practice from 5 summary statements in the Church Dogmatics based on the best sections recommended by  Ben Myers in his post

German Translation Practice–Church Dogmatics by Barth – Sections 33 47 50 59 Fragment.doc (46.5K)

 

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Sample practice 3. 

Here is more theological German practice from 8 summary statements of the best sections of Barth’s Church Dogmatics as recommended by the commenters at  Ben Myers’s post

German Translation Practice–Church Dogmatics by Barth – Sections 4 8 28 41 49 64 69 71.doc (49.5K)

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Sample practice 4. 

Download German Translation Practice–Church Dogmatics by Barth – IV.1 Sections 57-63.doc (52.0K)
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Sample practice 5.

See http://ergebung.wordpress.com/ for a number of readings in German with some translation help provided.

Theological German: Advice and Resources Homepage

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What other sources for theological German translation practice would you recommend?

Note from August 2021: This webpage was created in 2009 and has only been sporadically updated since then.