The course is designed to help the student initiate, sustain and close a general conversation, read consistently with full understanding simple connected texts and get some main ideas from texts featuring description and narration, write about personal experience, and appreciate culture-based values in the German tradition. Development of skills required to read for information and to analyze written materials of average difficulty. Readings consist of selections from typical narrative prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Intensive practice in German conversation. Students will learn and use appropriate functional expressions, will prepare and deliver dialogues and brief oral reports, and will engage in impromptu conversations on topics of current public and personal interest.
Attention is given to pronunciation, intonation, and fluency.
Review of the essentials of German grammar with application to composition. The course is designed to help students write simple social correspondence, take notes, write cohesive summaries and resumes, as well as narratives and descriptions of a factual nature. Study of the important movements in German literature from its origins through the eighteenth century. Reading and discussion of representative works, and the fundamentals of literary criticism. Basic literary survey from the early nineteenth century to the present time.