A Review of German Grammar by Bruce Duncan
No matter what’s stumping you when it comes to German grammar, a lucid and comprehensive explanation is just a click away – thanks to an online primer that Dr. Bruce Duncan developed for the Department of German Studies at Dartmouth College. Duncan taught at Dartmouth for 46 years until his retirement, in 2015. A Review of German Grammar reflects this experience in ways that made me wish it had been around when I began learning German. This was back in the early 1980s, a pre-internet age when technological aids for the DIY student of a foreign language were limited to recordings, oft-erratic shortwave radio and language labs (assuming, that is, that one was nearby). Anyway, many people – including Mark Twain, who wrote “The Awful German Language,” an 1880 essay appended to A Tramp Abroad – have asserted that German is prohibitively difficult to the point of being nearly impossible to master. To be sure, only a certain kind of DIY student will grasp German’s grammatical concept...