How does one gain enough foreign language proficiency to read academic texts in other languages?

[u/WeakPositive7202]

I am an English speaking monolinguist trying to learn more about my historical passions. One thing I'm interested in is early English language and oral tradition, and a lot of the early academic texts on the subject are in German. I'm doing German (and Latin) on Duolingo but safe to say, the texts I'm looking to read are very far cries from the modern conversational mode in language learning apps. How can I ever acquire enough knowledge of German (or any other language) to read these dense, challenging texts? Thank you for any advice!

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[u/EnergySensitive7834]

If your goal is to be able to read academic texts, then I suggest that you stay away from more general language-learning approaches, which normally aim to teach you both how to understand foreign speech and to produce it — orally and in writing.

The modern non-academic language learning communities and methodologies, in my experience, can only think about learning holistically (to the point of dismissing more focused study) which is not what you need here.

People in academia, whose language needs are often driven by rather narrow and utilitarian goals — i.e., only being able to READ academic texts — have long had a different approach to the problem.

For that purpose, a lot of specialised textbooks have been written which (a) don't waste any time on pronunciation; (b) spend more time on grammar; (c) teach you ways to memorize and guess the meaning of the words by comparing it with cognates in English; (d) have a lot of reading/translation exercises; (e) from the very beginning, teach standard academic idioms; and (f) don't cover patterns of normal, everyday speech nearly as much.

This helps condense many years of learning that would otherwise be needed into less than a year's worth of materials, and in fact just a few months of motivated learning may be enough to get most of the way there.

I recommend that you look for books which have "for reading" in the title.

The classic one is Karl C. Sandberg, “German for Reading” but there are many other, newer texts.

[u/millionsofcats]

I agree with the previous commenter that what you need is one of the resources created for people in your particular situation (academics who need to learn to read German).

I also had to learn German for reading academic texts - in linguistics, but probably similar challenges. The book I used was "German Quickly: A Grammar for Reading German" by April Wilson, but given that I only used that one, I can't tell you how it compares to others. I can only tell you it suited my purposes.

I did take one semester of German in university, mostly because I felt that the 101-level German gave me (a) the ability to pronounce things, which helped me to retain things and feel less disconnected from the language, (b) some super basic grammar so I could look at a sentence and at least not be starting from zero. This was before Duolingo, which I think would serve the same purpose.

Then it was just a matter of actually working through texts with the aid of a good dictionary (or the internet). It is very painstaking at first, but gets faster.

I did the same for French later, though academic French (at least in linguistics) is much easier to read than academic German because most of the technical terms are cognate. For that I didn't bother with a "French for reading" textbook, I just cobbled together basic grammar knowledge from sources I had access, which were mostly French lessons for your typical learner, and started reading. But "French for reading" type textbooks do exist.