About the creation of the bilingual books
Hello, my name is Beate Ziebell. I am your host on forum-sprachen-lernen. A few years ago, I became passionately interested in learning Italian and later French. I was already fluent in English (as a native German speaker), but despite many years of school lessons, I failed in my attempt to learn Russian. Yet even a language as close to German as English, however, I had only really learned after completing school.
With a demanding job and being a single mother, spending hours at school wasn’t an option. Moreover, I had also had negative experiences in school in this respect, of course. My son was learning English and French at school. I wanted to convey the experience of speaking a foreign language as being an enrichment. This skill is not only indispensable for careers today, but also opens doors to other cultures!
I was short on time but highly motivated to tackle the problem. There had to be another way of learning languages! One that was easier, faster, more sustainable. How do the best in this field manage to succeed in learning a foreign language, anyway?
These people usually practice quite a “normal” profession and still manage to learn a lot of languages on the side. They don’t have much time to learn the foreign language, unlike someone who is dealing with it all day due to their job or even studying the language (such as English). I wanted to learn more about their methods.
One of these methods is the L-R method, which I will describe in greater detail here. I made my first attempts to implement this method when I was looking to support my son learning English. We love the Star Trek series. I turned on the subtitles while watching it and wrote down some lines of dialog. At the same time, I recorded the soundtrack on (back then) a cassette. As a follow-up, we’d always listen to Star Trek at breakfast time. It was great for the learning process – we knew the storyline, my son loved the show and due to the repetitions on the cassette we soon had learned many passages by heart. However, over time, writing down the subtitles proved to be too time-consuming a task in the long run.
I wanted to use the same procedure in French, but in this case, it worked less well. The reason for this was that the French subtitles had very little to do with the spoken French dubbing. You can express the same thing in two very different ways; at least this was the case with the series we tried it with.
And that’s how the idea for these books came about. The goal was to identify an exciting text, provide the suitable translation and an audiobook so that the spoken and written word match precisely. What’s more, the text and translation should be combined in such a way that the translation can be located particularly quickly. We ultimately ended up listening to “The Red-Headed League”, a Sherlock Holmes story. We love Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s language and although it’s now several years ago, we still know some passages by heart.
These books are thus the result of our journey in search of good learning material and the right methods for learning languages.
Get ready to be taken into the world of Sherlock Holmes, Oscar Wilde or others, learn German or other languages at the same time and benefit from the tricks of the best in this field!
Recent Comments