It’s easy to forget how much language learning has changed over the years, unless you think back to your schooldays. You probably spent five lessons a week with “La Famille Bertillon”, and got to know them very well. Longmans Audio Visual French? Le Francais d’Aujourd’hui? Jean Pierre est dans le jardin. Beep!
I’ve been looking at three old German textbooks: “Let’s Go to Germany” from 1933, “Bill and Jock in Deutschland” from the 1950s and “Sprich mal Deutsch” from the 1970s.
“Let’s go to Germany” – a textbook from the year 1933
Here’s one of the most unusual things I’ve come across in a second-hand bookshop. The book, by Anton Hermann Winter, is called “Practical Travel Talks in English and German: Let’s go to Germany”. He takes us on a train journey to Berlin with a couple called Mr and Mrs Trotter, who must be very wealthy to afford a 6-week trip like this. This is a dual-language book with text in German and English: a reader for those who already know some German.
Unlike us on our trip to Berlin a few years ago, when they get there they won’t have to deposit their luggage in their holiday flat and dash out to buy something to eat. They won’t be hungry after they’ve eaten like this on the train…
They follow this up with ice cream, cheese and fruit and coffee on the next page. No pre-wrapped sandwiches for Mr and Mrs Trotter. I wonder how expensive the train restaurant was and whether many passengers could afford to eat there. I’d love to have a proper meal on a train but this facility seems to have disappeared in the UK, apart from maybe in first class carriages on some routes.
In Berlin we go with them to their hotel, shops, theatre, chemist, doctor…. And finish the holiday with a rather stilted visit to the zoo to celebrate Mrs Trotter’s birthday.
Click here for another post in which I’ve shown an example of a French textbook from the 1920s/30s.
“Modern Languages for the Services: German from Scratch – Bill and Jock in Deutschland” – a textbook from the 1950s.
This book was written just after the Second World War by an anonymous author. I assume he/she was serious about the names chosen for the soldiers. It’s not hard to guess where Jock comes from. It seems that the book was standard issue for members of the occupying forces stationed in Germany, as the aim stated at the front is “to enable the British soldier to make his way in Germany” and “converse with German citizens”. I wonder if it worked. The texts get progressively harder in the 15 chapters dealing with different scenarios. It would work if you were prepared to learn a lot of grammar and vocabulary in a short time.
In chapter 9 the two friends are comparing the facilities in their relative digs. The Germans are pleasant and friendly and the men are keen to explore, but they have some issues with their accommodation. Jock can’t sleep because he has a duvet and it falls off him in the night. Bill sleeps very well because his landlord is more enlightened – he’s been to England and been converted to the good old British sheets and blankets we’d all find really uncomfortable if we tried them now.
Bill has decided to get washed in the public baths rather than in the kitchen. Jock warns him on the next page that German women are very particular about their kitchens, which are sparkling clean. It’s easy for us to forget that originally public swimming baths were the place to go to have a bath as well as a swim. Jock is very fortunate in that his hosts clean his boots and pistol for a small extra charge….
“Sprich mal Deutsch” (Just Speak German), a textbook from the 1970s and 1980s.
“Sprich mal Deutsch” was a textbook familiar to most people learning German in UK schools until well into the 1980s. I think the author intended it to mean “Just speak German” so that we would expect it to be easy. Most of us had already been learning French for a year and thought at first that it meant “Speak bad German”. We still own a damp, yellow copy of this book which tells the adventures of the stereotypical “Ehlers” family. My husband retains a few phrases from it including “Julia geht ins Kino” (Julia is going to the cinema), “Die Sonne scheint” and “Spiegelei mit Bratkartoffeln” (fried egg with roast potatoes). In his case, a little vocabulary can get him a long way as he manages to find ways of adapting these expressions on trips to Germany, eg. “Die Sonne scheint nicht”.
At the beginning of each chapter we were presented with a collection of largely unrelated nouns, and would turn the page to discover a little story containing all these words. Then there would be lots of “exercises” to do.
Here are the first two pages of the book.
I made a mess of my exercise book, correcting the exercises following this page. I’d forgotten that in German every noun starts with a capital letter, so I had to change most of the words afterwards. This was very annoying. With the first chapter there is no story, so the author’s choice of nouns for the first page remains a mystery. I assume he decided to write sentences which we would have no difficulty understanding, eg. “Ist das ein Mann? Ja, das ist ein Mann”. My inspiration came from looking ahead in the book and realizing that the texts which now looked like gobbledygook would eventually be meaningful. I’d discovered this from my experience of learning French, where all sentences on the first page of the textbook began with the puzzling phrase “Il y a” (for which my dictionary yielded “he there has”). I knew I would be able to decode all the texts by the time I’d finished the book, and that would be in the following summer if the French book was anything to go by.
This book seems incredibly dated and funny to us now, but people did actually learn German from it. It did work! I expect most people can remember the language textbooks they learnt from at school: some stereotypical “families” and things which now make us laugh! Any more memories?
I studied German at the Welwyn Garden City Grammar School in the 60s. Bill Rowlinson was our teacher, and he told us we were “guinea pigs” for a new German textbook he was writing. That book eventually became “Sprich’ mal Deutsch”!
Bill was an exceptional teacher, extraordinarily student-focussed, and pomposity-free. His lessons were an oasis of sanity in the craziness of a baby-boomer secondary education.
He went on to teach education at, I believe, Sheffield University, and pursue a stellar career thereafter, as we know.
It’s people like Bill who are the real movers and shakers.
Thank you for letting us know about your personal experience of “W. Rowlinson”, Martin! It’s interesting to get an insight into what he was really like as a teacher. Inside the textbook it does indeed say “Lecturer in Education, Sheffield University”.
Anyone remember Biberswald textbooks . Had it in the 80s in London
Thanks for contributing! The title sounds familiar – was it the name of a village and the story of the inhabitants? Can you remember any of it? It seems that lots of people can remember the characters from their language textbooks and the (sometimes funny) things they said!
Hi Jane and Deb,
Yes, I remember Biberswald! Dreadful. We were doing it in 1982 in secondary school. The year after was “Unterwegs”, by the same author. It wasn’t brilliant either. I’ve always loved learning languages, but this book absolutely destroyed my enthusiasm to learn German.
The main characters were the Fiedler family – Maria and her parents, and her English male penfriend (Andrew?). Maria also had an elder brother called Paul, whose wife was called Inge. Inge “helped out at the local hospital” when the medical staff were on strike… as you would.
I remember the first half-dozen pages of Biberswald were in colour – a promising start – but then the rest of the book was “illustrated” by drab black and white line drawings – even to the point that the family’s “Hotel Bayrisches Tal” had two minibuses caled Max and Moritz: one was white and the other was grey… so obviously to save money on colour print. What a cop out!
It didn’t do anything to help understand why German nouns may be any of the three genders, or demystify the four cases (we learned that in Latin the year after), or the miserable presentation of conditional sentences: “Willi geht in der Kegelbahn, wenn er kegeln will”. I only realised about 10 years later that “wenn” means “if” not “when”, and “will” means “wants” not “will”. Or for example that “in” with the Dative means “inside”, but with the Accusative means “into”. So easy to explain, but this book just didn’t. The whole methodology seemed to emphasise the complexities of German without explaining it at all. That and the added handicap of a useless teacher made German the only language I’ve attempted to learn but then gave up on. Now 38 years later I’m learning German again and I’m tempted to write a user-friendly German text book for English speakers who find German baffling.
Hi Simon, and thank you for telling us about your German “journey”! It’s good that we have an ongoing group conversation inspired by my post, and also that you’re learning German again despite your school experiences. I wonder which book you are using now?! I agree that one of the annoying things about textbooks used to be that the writers seemed to think it was a bad idea to explain grammar – you were just supposed to absorb it. That’s the way you can learn before the age of 3 if you have adequate exposure, but not when you’re older/in the classroom! I was fortunate enough to have a German teacher who believed in explaining grammar to us. Good luck with your learning!
I have taught German for more than 45 years. Best course I ever used wasVorwärts , part of the Nuffield project, published by Arnold Wheaton. Especially good we’re the accompanying readers. What do others think?
The key idea was real progression through stories, not the faux authenticity of arbitrary topics prevalent today.
I do know where you’re coming from, John. I’m not familiar with the Vorwaerts course, but I recently compared the AQA standard German textbook for GCSE, which is theme-based, with the story-based German textbook Maximal. Maximal is published in Germany and written by Germans. I prefer Maximal because it tells a story about a group of young people. My 15 year-old says this is more appealing, too. I think there’s a reason why so many people can still remember the families they learned about in their language lessons! We all like stories and getting to know the characters. Maximal also has accompanying readers which I’ll look out for. The other reason I like Maximal is that the instructions are all in German and the layout is clearer and more imaginative. Thank you for contributing.
One of the co-authors was Michael Law, who was Bill Rowlinson’s equivalent at Leeds University, and another exceptional tutor – cultured, knowledgeable about all things German, Austrian and Swiss and very ‘go-ahead.’
My boyfriend did German and used Sprich Mal Deutsch (which still reads as ‘Speak Bad German’ in my mind even though he told me what it meant), I did Latin instead of German, but am still grateful for Longmans Audio-Visual French, which enabled me to manage on a secondment to the European Court of Justice. Boyfriend and I had a lot of time to kill on a wet family holiday in Wales and I started to teach myself German from his textbooks. At that point, I couldn’t have guessed that I would ever need it, but some 20 years later my husband was relocated to Germany at short notice and I found I’d given myself enough of a basis to cope and later become reasonably fluent. I only wish our children had been taught half as well – neither got on well with the direct method and the endless repetition of ‘what I did at the weekend’, preferring clear explanations of the grammar. That way, the same child who struggled with Spanish became reasonably competent at Japanese!
That’s interesting, Estelle. It seems that although the old textbooks seem amusing now, they did teach people how the language actually worked rather than just how to repeat set phrases as the direct method tended to do. So in the old days children could manipulate the language and they expected to be given grammar exercises to reinforce each new point. There was usually a family story to follow whereas now the chapters are topic-based. The grammar points and exercises are back again though, in the new GCSE textbooks!
I am afraid I have less happy memories of Mr Rowlinson and the German department at WGC Grammar School. My memory of his approach was that of rote learning. Moreover, there was a bad mix up over my end of term exam. It had been marked by another German teacher-whose name I cannot remember (female middle aged). She had continually picked on me the year before when we had her as our German teacher. She had added up the marks for individual questions incorrectly so that the final total put me near the bottom of the year. Fortunately I spotted this and my final mark was revised. But it is worrying that the teacher who lambasted me most was incapable of simple maths. Luckily the next year we had Mr Percy who was a really great teacher.
Hi Peter and thank you for contributing. We all have such vivid memories of our teachers and how we felt about learning languages!
Has “Sprich mal Deutsch” got a story where Has tries to get a Fruchttorte out of the cupboard but drops it on the floor? I have mid-1970s school German memories of this, in which “Hans greift nach der Torte im Schrank” or similar. Our teacher insisted implacably, to universal embarrassment, that we could not translate ‘Torte’ as ‘cake’ but, must, MUST translate it as ‘tart’.
Yes! … “Hans kann auch nicht warten. ….er holt eine Torte heraus. Aber o weh! Die Torte rutscht aus seiner Hand und faellt auf den Boden.” I hasten to say that I found it in our copy of the book, I don’t know it off by heart! It’s funny how everyone remembers the families and stories from school textbooks.
Ah, that brings it all back. Agreed about the schoolbooks. I also retain memories of our O-level Russian textbook which started with a picture of a man on a tractor ploughing a large field. The book intoned something like:
“Воt Иvан, Иvан рабоtаеt на колхозе. Иvан рабоtаеt на tракtoре.”
“Vot Ivan. Ivan rabotayet na kokhozye. Ivan rabotayet na traktorye.”
“This is Ivan. Ivan works on a collective farm. Ivan is working on the tractor”
Always particularly treasured the reference to the “Kolkhoz” aka collective farm. At the time we guessed the book must have been picked by our French and Russian teacher, a devoted Marxist who later spent his retirement volunteering at the Karl Marx library in London.
Can anyone remember the German 1970s audio visual course which was set in Cadolzburg and contained such useful phrases as “Schau – eine Lerche!’? I think it might have been the German equivalent of la famille Bertillon. We occasionally used it with the legendary Frau Derbyshire at Allerton High School, Leeds.
Yes !!! Mein hund heist Lumpi…..
Can’t for life of me remember the name
Und “Mein Vater ist ein Sparkassenleiter” – featuring Hans and Lieselotte (and Lumpi of course)
A quick google of ‘Lumpi ist mein Hund’ finds that these were the Vorwarts books listed above, though I don’t remember that title at all, I wonder if the title was changed? However I do remember the whole of this verbatim… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YERfOPDVGUk
Amazing that you remember it all! These stories seem to have made a big impression on us. The present-day GCSE books are based on facts rather than fiction and I can’t imagine that many kids will remember sentences from them in years to come. Perhaps the stories grab our imagination in a way that facts don’t.
Vorwarts – set in Cadolzburg (mit Lumpi)
Austin, your Russian textbook reminded me of the one we had at school. After landing at Moscow airport, the male passenger (a sturdy Soviet citizen, though I forget his name) says brightly “So, this is Moscow is it?” (you think he would have noticed this before they landed). At passport control he informs the officer that “my wife is an engineer”. The wife doesn’t get a word in, but clearly she is a good Soviet engineer so that sorts out gender bias.
I’ve been planning one day to fly to Moscow so that I can repeat on the tarmac the only words of Russian that I can remember.
Hi there
Thank you for this blog ! I am looking for a German teaching book, for adults really, early 80s (so published late 70s?). It was not Wegweiser or Sprich mal Deutsch, and it was not BBC. It seemed to have lots of neurotic characters whose life mission was to find a Kuli at the airport (luggage trolley then). There were cassettes associated with the course (wow!). It was not inexpensive, and thoughtfully constructed for its time.
In USA. Had a German short story book to translate into English in high school in the 1980s. We also had the standard textbook, but the short story one was to learn writing and translation. It was about Goethe or wilhelm I think. Couldn’t have been more that 50 pages. It had an orange and white cover. Can’t remember much more. I think it had something to do with him being a traveler (?). It was just an add-on to help learn. I’d love to find it again or even the title of it, to see if I can keep my brain engaged. LOL. Thank you.
Anyone …?
Thanks for contributing Lisa and I hope someone can help, although it may take a while.
1971, Sale Boys’ Grammar, must have been an early edition of Sprich Mal Deutsch but I can remember the phrase “Die Sonne scheint” like yesterday. Aswell to teach verb conjugation we learned the following by heart from the book…”Wenn der Wecker, jeden morgen in Julias Schlafzimmer lautet, stehen sie langsam auf und gehen sie noch langsam in das Badeszimmer.” I might not be 100% correct but then again, it’s half a century ago. Thanx for stimulating my brain with such precious memories Jane.
Thanks for commenting Geoff! Until I wrote this post I never realised how much people love reminiscing about language textbooks from their schooldays. I think we all liked the stories and getting to know these pretend families. Also, we can smile at the stereotypes and the unusual phrases which we weren’t ever likely to use, eg. Hans steht unter einem Wasserfall. It did work though!
We were using Vorwarts throughout the 80s (I taught in London and Cornwall) and yes it was set in Cadolzburg near Nurnberg. My wife and I visited the village during our Interrail trip in 1981. It is (or was then) a beautiful village and people there were fascinated to know that their home had featured in so many English students’ education; we were treated very well. I had a colleague who could quote huge chunks of the text by heart. Hife Hilfe Hans! was a favourite expression.
That’s a lovely story, thank you Andrew. I wonder if there were any similar English textbooks used in Germany?
I am really enjoying this thread about old language textbooks and as an ex-secondary school teacher and currently adult tutor of German and French, I agree there is a lot to be said for a story-based approach. I loved the Bertillons from Le Francais d’aujourd’hui! With that in mind, I am trying to find the name of the German textbook we used at school, which was set in the Black Forest. I loved reading about the characters’ youth hostelling adventures and hiking trips but have no recollection of their names or the book’s title! Can anyone help, as I am sure my adult learners would enjoy these books. Thanks so much,
Steph Spence
Thanks, Steph – I hope someone can help with this. It sounds like a great textbook. I’m intrigued now myself and will try a bit of googling, although I suppose you’ve already looked online. Good luck!
Is it Deutsche Heute? I seem to recall it was set in that part of Germany.
Oh, I wonder? I don’t know this book, but it seems to have quite good reviews despite not being updated since the introduction of the euro. By the way, I remember coming across an old textbook – can’t remember the title – where the first sentence in the first chapter was: “Deutschland ist ein Staat in Westeuropa”!
I stumbled upon this by chance. I, too, started learning French with la famille Bertillon. I also later came across Sprich Mal Deutsch and always remember one of the first sentences, I think, very useful, “Die Bratkartofflen sind fertig” – the fried potatoes are ready. I had a young German teacher and he found a modern little book called “Geradeaus” which was all about role-play in real situations, I really enjoyed that.
There are so many issues surrounding textbook portrayal of other cultures and I shudder now at some of the received assumptions of these 1970s staples. So better let’s not start on the whole “Tricolore” series, highly prolific and lucrative through their different iterations, but very definitely aimed at a grammar/public school audience and mind-set.
Thanks for your comments, Gareth, and yes, I used to think that Spiegelei mit Bratkartoffeln were part of a German’s staple diet 🙂
We learned German with the Biberswald series of textbooks mentioned early on in the comments in the early 80s at
a comprehensive in Herts and I’m so pleased to have stumbled upon this discussion thread. I seem to remember early on in one of these books it having a story based in Oberammergau with its 10 yearly Passion Play. This has stuck so fast in my memory that I’m now, finally going to watch the play in a couple of months time, being based quite close to that part of Germany currently. None of my peers seem to have even heard of the play, but I remember it so vividly from one of those textbooks! I hated learning German, but it did after all come in useful as we’ve now lived in Germany for the last 13 or so years!!
It’s so good that you’ve been able to revive the German you learned at school, even though you didn’t enjoy it at the time. I hope you’re now enjoying living in Germany, and continuing to learn the language.
I was loaned a copy of “Sprich mal Deutsch!” by my German teacher when I was trying to get her to teach me some basics of grammar (in any language), as our “modern” “Zickzack” didn’t really do any of that, it was all ordering ice-creams and buying train tickets: useful stuff, of course, but I wanted to understand all the grammatical errors in my homework (which she couldn’t explain either). My grammar understanding (in every language) is still pretty poor, but my German is ok, having left the country to move to Berlin as soon as I’d finished schoool.
Shortly afterwards she gave me the book, “Sprich mal Deutsch!” got a mention, back when “comedy was the new rock and roll” on BBC2’s “Mary Whitehouse Experience”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoLt-0_Clbw
Yes, Sprich mal Deutsch was good for grammar. I’ve just watched the video about it – very funny! Thank you.
I remember a text book which I think was called “Vorwarts” but which some clever fellow schoolboy called “Ruckwarts” and had a lovely dog called Lumpi…or am I in my dotage just imagining it all?
Yes – Lumpi is mentioned with affection further down on this chat!
I would love to lay my hands (or eyes) on a set of Francais d’Aujourd’hui illustrated school textbooks from the 70s, which I recall were bound in landscape format. Can’t find a picture of it on the internet!
I can report the Bertillon family’s combination of pictures, descriptions, bit-by-bit lexicon and tests were a success and at 16 I was ready to get on my bicycle wearing a striped top, beret and onions. Which despite all the education was how we conceptualised the French at that time. All I lacked in adult life was French people to talk to.
I have become fascinated by the relative ease of its acquisition compared to the present circumstances and, corny or not, I would like to see these books again.
Yes, I can almost see that book in front of me – I remember the shape, it was blue I think, and I remember being flummoxed by that word “d’aujourd’hui” and thinking that if the word for “today” is so complicated what hope would I have for the rest of the French language …
Just reread this chat after a few years, having made the initial comment. What an interesting “Nachfolge”!
All that I can remember is that Bill was awake to the power of absurdity to drive home the grammar. We used to vie to invent the most ridiculous (but grammatically accurate) sentences in our grammar homework. I was particularly proud of my creation : “Warum hat deine Großmutter meine Rhabarber-Sandwiches geklaut?” To which Bill Rowlinson added the comment :”Schön!”
I loved the YouTube video.
I guess you had to be there..
Thank you Martin, you started – and continued – a very interesting and amusing discussion! I’m interested to hear Bill’s approach to grammar using “absurdity”. It sounds like it was a good way of having fun with the grammar, and perhaps an idea we should re-introduce. I’ve found that if students don’t learn the grammar off by heart, they forget the basics as they go along, and get demoralized when they can’t get it right later on. The learning off by heart can be tedious (but so worth it) and it’s worth trying to find ways to use humour. When I was learning Latin at school, a friend set some of the grammar declensions to music. It really helped to sing them! I thought that Bill’s textbook was intended to be serious, but now I wonder if it was all meant to be silly….
Hi all. I studied German in the 1970’s and can remember Die familie Schaudi – Hans, Lieselotte and Lumpi” Plus a rambling story about picking mushrooms…Lieselotte falls and cries out “hilfe hilfe Hans! Mein Bein ist gebrochen! Ich muß im Krankenhaus gehen” (hoping my grammar/spelling is reasonable)…cue loads of vocabulary about hospital, doctors and nurses…naff but really helped me learn the language.
Thanks Avril, I think that’s another example of an actual story being really helpful to learners. The fact that it was “naff” probably made it funny and therefore even more memorable!