Traumleser: Dream Laboratory for German
The idea behind Traumleser can be summed up in a simple formula:
Learn by Day, Dream by Night.
Learning occurs through careful attention to language. That is Learn by Day.
Learning also happens through images, sounds and words, and through literary texts that are read and listened to. This is Dream by Night.
At Traumleser, the first exercises are always listening exercises. Then we focus on single words and their meanings. Only afterwards do we move on to reading, because language is first heard and then read.
Grammar is a marginal phenomenon. It only becomes visible — like our waiter — when the text itself brings it into focus. This is the principle behind Learn by Day: grammar emerging from examples taken directly from our texts. We never use random sentences taken from nowhere.
In our brand new course! German Every Day: Get Ready to Dream, we will alternate between these two activities: one day, we will dream through listening and reading; the next day, we will learn through concentrated work on one grammatical phenomenon.
Alice Munro captured this perfectly when she wrote:
You can’t take your attention from the tempest or it will rip open your last defenses. You try, for sanity’s sake, to fix on some calm detail of your surroundings, but the wind's cries are able to inhabit a cushion or a figure in the rug or a tiny whirlpool in the window glass.
Fixing on some calm detail means observing grammar closely and patiently. The tempest and the wind's cries are something else entirely; they are the hidden messages of literature.
Sometimes just a few sentences are enough. An attentive listener or reader — Traumleser means 'dream reader' — notices them and is touched by them.
You'll see it in our brand new course! German Every Day: Get Ready to Dream. Just a few sentences can make the world — and the certainties we rely on — begin to waver or change, or even disappear completely. This is evident in the carefully selected stories.
Keep learning, and above all, keep dreaming!
Stephanie