LOOKING FOR A GREAT WAY TO TEACH YOURSELF GERMAN? READ THE NEWS AT NACHRICHTENLEICHT.DE

For anyone studying the German language on their own, the benefits of a German-language news site are obvious.

It’s an interesting way to improve your reading comprehension. It enlarges your vocabulary, deepens your understanding of current events in German-speaking countries and, often, offers a different perspective on the United States’ influence in the world.

Unless you are an advanced student, though, reading the news can be prohibitively difficult, particularly if the vocabulary is unfamiliar or too specialized. Or, maybe, the topic of an article is too obscure to divine its gist.

Fortunately, there are several alternatives to mainstream news sites that can give the ambitious novice the confidence and tools they need to tackle more challenging fare as they progress. One of the best is at www.nachrichtenleicht.de

Nachrichtenleicht is offered by Germany’s Deutschlandfunk, a state-supported radio broadcaster with a web component. It’s the first of many vehicles for DIY learners of German I intend to review in this blog. Nachrichtenleicht, which means "news-lite," is published each Friday. It bills itself as a roundup of the week's major stories in plain language. It is just that -- and much more: 

It features several articles in one of four categories: News, Culture, Miscellany and Sports. Each story features both a Was bedeutet…(“What’s the meaning of…”) section and a slow-German audio version. Was bedeutet… provides several sentences of additional background on words and concepts in the text.

As for the audio, you can listen to it as you read the text. It ensures that you will correctly pronounce each and every vowel and syllable of each and every word.

Also, and this is very important for novice readers, Nachrichtenleicht eschews Subjunctive I, a verb form or mood often used in formal news writing, for a simpler way of paraphrasing quotes. Paraphrased quotes on Nachrichtenleicht are introduced with such words as Er sagte (“He said:”) and include simple declarative sentences in the present tense.

A little German Grammar 101: As the book German in Review puts it, Subjunctive I is “used for formal, impartial reporting.” The book’s example is: De Gaulle sagte, dass Frankreich das bedeutendste Land Europas sei (“De Gaulle said that France is the most significant country in Europe”). Sei is the Subjunctive I form of ist (“is”); by using it, the reporter “is maintaining an objective distance from de Gaulle’s words,” the book says.

Believe me, as a former student of German who eventually taught that language in high school, Subjunctive I takes awhile to master.