Lydia Davis method

 There's a method of learning to read a language. Lydia Davis has an essay in which she explains how she studied Spanish.  She took a translation of Twain (Las aventuras de Tom Sawyer) and read it in Spanish. She wouldn't look up words in the dictionary, but would guess at the meaning of words and learn new words eventually from context. She would keep a notebook in which she wrote down new words she learned. She could essentially understand most of the vocabulary using cognates in French (she is a Proust translator) and context. 

I had a year (possibly more?) of college German years ago and I am trying this.  I picked up a German novel called Der Junge Beethoven for 5 bucks at a used bookstore. Obviously it is about Beethoven's young days!

For the first few pages I wrote down words I already know. Frau, Mann. Kind. Fenster. Haus, Vater, Mutter, Sohn, Tochter, Gott, Himmel, Nacht, heute, and wrote down others that I thought I knew or could easily guess.  Lippen.  Musiker. I can recognize articles, some numbers. Nouns are capitalized and verbs can be identified.  I understand the syntactic structure very well.  

I wrote down some complete sentences or brief phrases that were transparent for me, of the "Ich liebe dich" or "Wo bist du?" type.  

They live in Bonn. There is some reference to a Hinterhaus. The father is a Kapellmeister of some kind. He is happy to have a son because he can form him into a musician. He gives thanks that Gott in Himmel has answered his prayers.  

I probably have 100 words written down.  I went back to the first page and it was easier to read than on the first try. You want to get to where the most common 2 or 3 thousand words are understood effortlessly. 

Not using the dictionary is key, because the dictionary slows you down (not that I am going fast!) and also shuts down the effort of guessing, which is key. I have used something similar to this method (without the notebook) with Italian and gotten pretty far.  I can read most Romance languages fairly well but German should be a different kind of challenge.  

I picked up a pop German novel (translated from English probably) on a trip to Cuba years ago, which someone had left behind in a hotel room. I could kind of follow the plot.  

***

Here is Lydia's explanation of not using a dictionary, from another essay about learning Norwegian:

"I did not want to use a dictionary. First, it was more comfortable not to be constantly picking up a dictionary, or sitting in front of a computer. Since, at first, there would be a quantity of words on any given page that I would not know, I would have been looking up many, many words, and this would have been a cumbersome chore. I wanted to sit with this heavy book in a comfortable chair, with nothing more, besides the book, than a sharp pencil and piece of paper.

Second, though, and more important, the work of trying to figure out what the words meant was stimulating and completely absorbing. I realized, after a while, that using my brain for something as difficult as this made thinking a very physical act, much more so than the easier, almost unconscious use we make of our brains most of the time."

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (p. 430). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

"Another reason I did not want to use a dictionary or ask anyone for the answer was that, almost right away, this experiment interested me qua experiment, and I wanted to keep it quite pure. I was trying to learn a language the way we learn our own native language from babyhood on up. Words are repeated in certain contexts, some contexts the same and some different, and eventually, over time, with much repetition, we learn what the words mean."

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (pp. 432-433). (Function). Kindle Edition.