If you already have a basic understanding of German, Syntactium for Autodidacts may be an excellent, cost-effective alternative to one-to-one lessons. Whereas we charge 60 euros for 90 minutes of one-to-one teaching, unlimited access to Syntactium for Autodidacts costs no more than 10 euros per month. Syntactium for Autodidacts gives you access to the same wealth of resources that we use in our one-to-one lessons, including all the structured exercises.
Syntactium for Autodidacts alone isn't right for everyone. If you want to understand how the language works, why words have certain forms or endings, or why sentences are structured in the way they are, then you would benefit from tutoring. Having said that, we do include some beginner texts.
Syntactium for Autodidacts brings together over 250 texts, including very simple short stories and fairy tales (for beginners and near beginners), intermediate and advanced factual texts on a very wide range of topics, and short stories and essays (in full and extracts) from the titans of German-literature and thought, including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig.
The texts are broken down into passages of around 100 words, and these passages are broken down into segments of one or two sentences each.
Each segment is translated into English and comes with the following exercises:
- Three cloze ("fill in the blank") exercises. The first tests the most frequently occurring function words (e.g. der, die, das). The second tests other function words (like prepositions, common verbs and adverbs). The third tests other vocabulary (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs).
- A "jumbled word exercise". Here all the words in the segment are junbled up and have to be rearranged in the correct order.
There is an additional writing exercise every at the end of every passage, where you will be invited to write something using key words from the passage.
The exercises are grouped by passage, allowing you to work on the segments in context.
If you complete all segment and passage exercises for a given passage, you will have been intensively exposed to the language in the passage and had an opportunity to deploy what you have absorbed. If you want to skip some of the exercises for a passage or two in order to get into the narrative or argument, you can do so.
Click here to subscribe to Syntactium for Autodidacts.