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Handbuch Zur Deutschen Grammatik

by Jamie Rankin
512 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-305-07884-0

German Schoolhouse Rock:

A review on Jamie Rankin’s Handbuch Zur Deutschen Grammatik
By Gustavo L. Ott

The German idiom “Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache” translates to saying “German
language, difficult language,” and for anyone embarking on the journey of learning the language,
they would find out soon enough just how accurate that saying is. Learning the language is full
of twists and turns that feel like a metaphor for navigating the country’s winding roads; full of
addendums to each clause that remind one of going through a Wikipedia article and constantly
having to click on the hyperlinked and foreign terms, only to end up on a random article about
something one really had no intention of learning about, at least not at the time. Basically,
despite native speakers finding it hard to empathize with how their language could possibly be
anything than easy as it is for them, it doesn’t take away from German being a downright
confusing language to learn. Yet the language is finding itself as a newly found popular language
to learn among the United States’ young students, and it is at this point where Professor Jamie
Rankin steps in.
Jamie Rankin is a senior professor at the esteemed Princeton University in Princeton,
New Jersey, and a leading force of the establishment’s Germanic Studies Department. Rankin
completed his Ph.D. in German literature not too far away at Harvard University, and went on to
specialize himself in second language acquisition and pedagogy across the country at the
University of Hawaii. He has since made an even stronger name for himself in creating various
computer programs and modules to aid students in their venture of learning the German
language, having founded the Princeton-in-Munich exchange program, and for what it’s worth,
enjoys a lucrative 5.0 rating from his students on the prominent ratemyprofessors.com website. It
then makes sense when one realizes he’s the lead co-author of the renowned textbook, Handbuch
Zur Deutschen Grammatik (“Handbook to the German Grammar”), America’s leading textbook
for university-level German classes and its students. To no surprise, the book rests on its title
with earned credit, having a clean-cut readability that breaks down its lessons into bite-size
chunks as well as utilizes creative language that modern-day students can relate to.
Indeed, the thing that probably comes as most surprising is the fact that the textbook isn’t
trying too hard to be modern – it just naturally is. Other textbooks may often try too hard in the
matter of reading as a modern textbook, the author forcing themselves to include terms such as
“snapchatting” and phrases where something is “lit”, but give themselves away in that they were
pressured by their editors into using the millennial’s vocabulary when they refer to a “dab” as a
type of dance form. The authors of these types of textbooks may have the intention of relating to
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younger audiences, but sadly have the adverse effect of alienating them the way the pilot episode
to the Will & Grace sequel did. The devil is in the details, and Handbuch Zur Deutschen
Grammatik has made sure to master them or simply leave them out entirely. In a small, yet
significant example of this mastery is in the textbook’s page 129 in chapter 8 on past tense,
where the translation of an example reads as “I’ve gotten at least 30 texts in the last 10 minutes.”
Had this book been written by the aforementioned type of author, it quite possibly might’ve
referred to texts as the unnecessarily specified “text messages”. This distinction may be as small
as a grain of sand and seemingly insignificant, but the accumulation of sand can has led to the
creation of a beach of issues big enough to bury other textbooks.
As a matter of fact, more often than not does Rankin prefer to look towards the past
rather than try to focus on the future. On that same page of chapter 8, where the chapter’s
exercises begin, he starts off with a shortened version of “Hans and the Beanstalk,” the version
of the English fairy tale that was rather popular in German-speaking Europe. It is with the
inclusion of such segments of German or German-influenced culture that Rankin finds a way to
not only teach the student the German language, but to also teach and partially immerse them
within the German culture. Thus, often without the their own knowledge, the student
successfully learns of the culture together with its language without having to read any elaborate
side-charts with articles they were likely to ignore anyways.
Which isn’t to say that Handbuch Zur Deutschen Grammatik is void of any charts and
tables whatsoever and is just one long stream of grey-space text. The textbook actually has quite
a few charts and tables, used neatly and with clarity to show the relation of the chapter’s subject.
These charts can be created in a simple fashion, such as on page 66 of chapter 5 when Rankin
introduces the four cases for German nouns; nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. In this
case, Rankin simply lists the four terms neatly next to each other on a line of their own, divided
simply with light blue (the overall color theme of the textbook) “│” lines to divide them in-
between. Simple, but elegant. Even in the textbook’s more elaborate tables, such as chapter 9’s
page 140 on modal verbs, the book stays true to its color scheme in using various shades of light
blue to create a table that can make an overwhelming list of foreign words far more easier to
grasp, splitting the long lists into smaller groups than other language textbooks would in order to
maintain those bite-size chunks the book uses to instill its lessons.
It is this straightforward, yet simultaneously patient mentality that the book strives to
imbue into the students’ approach when learning a new language, especially one as complex as
German itself. Like its mixture of texts and well-proportioned charts and tables, the book’s
overall chapters are divided similarly, each containing the same segments: “Zum Beispiel: …”
(“For Example: …”), “Grammatik” (“Grammar”), “Wortschatz: Vokabeln zum Studium”
(“Vocabulary: [Vocabulary Words] to the Study”), “Übungen” (“Exercises”), “Anwendung”
(“Application”), “Schriftliche Themen” (“Written Topics”), and “Zusammenfassung”
(“Summary”). Where many language textbooks may distinguish their chapters in far less
segments than Raskin, they fall short in giving students that feeling of being overloaded with too
much information, but not Raskin. Vicariously through the style of how he devised his chapters,
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he is once again subconsciously instilling the message for the student to keep calm, breathe, and
realize that learning a lesson is more like a checkpoint race rather than one long marathon.
For the most part, Rankin also finds a great balance in how he knows when to talk to the
student in German, and when he should simply explain something in plain English. Most of the
chapters’ instructions and explanations are written in English, giving stronger emphasis to when
there is German on the page to boldening the font or, as you can surely guess, highlighting them
in light blue. It isn’t till the exercises segment when the language of the instructions and
explanations dive entirely into German, forcing the student to utilize their basic skills in the
language. This transition for the exercises is vital for anyone who has studied a new language
will tell you that immersion is the best practice. Rankin doesn’t leave the student stranded,
however, making sure to include the English translations of advanced words and terms in
italicized font within parentheses.
This, however, might also be where the book does begin to find one of its shortcomings
though. Some might see the immersion that the exercise segments of the chapter utilize as not
including enough instruction description and advanced vocabulary translation. For someone who
has spent a great amount of time in planning the textbook to be easily comprehensible by
stripping it down from all the confusing distractions, it would seem that Rankin dove too far into
the minimalist philosophy with his book. The problem then becomes that the straightforward
directions are detailed enough to emanate the feeling that professors need not explain any further
to what their students need to do in the homework, but oversimplify the task to the point where
the professors would only realize the shortcoming in hindsight once a great majority of the class
would have committed the same mistakes. The probably strongest example for where this
scenario might occur can be found in the exercises of the 5th chapter’s page 78 on the four cases.
Exercise A presents the student with a block of German text and asks for them to identify which
nouns are in which case (dative, nominative, accusative, or genitive), yet forgets to mention that
some nouns are connected to the nouns that come after them and take on their case rather than
the case they when if they were to stand on their own.
This overdoing of minimalism is where Rankin falls short the most throughout the
textbook, which even plants the thought in the student whether or not the minimalist choice of
barely utilizing pictures at all is too much. Minimalism shouldn’t mean to exclude something
altogether, yet the textbook’s entire 512 pages might have a dozen images at most. Still, in a
world with overly confusing instructions and overall nonsensical attempts of relating to students,
the choice of breaking things down to their bare bones for the student to piece it together
themselves easily trumps any of the textbook’s shortcomings, and any of Rankin’s for that
matter.