Mord am Morgen

I first came across André Klein\’s work in Café in Berlin, a collection of very short German stories that follow the hapless and entertaining Dino as he tries to make his way in Berlin. I really enjoyed Dino\’s adventures, but I wanted something a bit longer and more difficult. Fortunately, I found that Klein had written another series of books, beginning with Mord am Morgen, and intended for \”intermediate and advanced students\” as opposed to Café in Berlin\’s audience of \”beginners\”. This sounded perfect. I liked the idea of a longer continuous narrative, and I figured it would be good for me to read something a bit more challenging. Unfortunately, Mord am Morgen didn\’t quite live up to my expectations, for a variety of reasons. First, while the story is \”longer\” in the sense that it is a continuous narrative rather than vignettes that can be read in any order, it\’s not actually longer overall; I still read the whole book in about an hour. Second, while the sentences are probably more difficult, a lot of the increased difficulty just comes from the significant reduction in vocabulary provided at the end of each section. This is not very helpful. It was frustrating to see all the empty space on the page where there could have been useful words. It\’s true that I could still follow the story without the additional vocabulary, but I missed having the extra learning tool. And it deterred me from checking the vocabulary at all, because more often than not the word I was looking for wasn\’t there. My main problem with this book, though, is that some of the questions at the ends of the sections are just flat-out bad. In Café in Berlin, the questions were comprehension-based, testing whether you understood what had happened in the passage you just read. Probably 75% of the Mord am Morgen questions follow this approach, and those questions are fine. But there are also questions that just test outside knowledge, which is completely unhelpful and annoying. For example, at one point the detective goes into a bar and orders \”red and white fries\”. There\’s no further discussion of it, so it doesn\’t make sense to ask in the comprehension questions what exactly that means. I happened to know from Café in Berlin that it referred to fries with ketchup and mayonnaise, and you\’d have a pretty good chance of guessing that based on the colors, but it could conceivably refer to fries from Austria or fries made from a special kind of potato. The important point is that figuring out the answer to the question has absolutely nothing to do with reading the preceding story, and that\’s bad. If you asked me out of nowhere what \”red and white fries\” were, and gave me a choice of those three options, I\’d have just as much chance of guessing as I would if I\’d actually read the story. Other bad questions deal with synonyms: \”Which word is not a synonym for this one?\” Well, one of those words actually appeared in the story, but I have no way of deciding between the other two unless I happen to know the words already. Again, not helpful as a follow-up to the story. Then there were the questions that just didn\’t match the story exactly: we read that an event happened \”around 1:30\”, so we choose \”1:24\” as an answer, because it\’s obviously not 10 or 4. Or when someone gets shot in the leg, that\’s apparently equivalent to the foot, because it\’s definitely not the arm or the shoulder. Awkward. Finally, there were occasional questions about word order (\”Which word order is incorrect?\”), which I don\’t think is really appropriate in a book that doesn\’t have any discussion of grammar. And again, these were questions that didn\’t depend on reading the preceding section; I could answer them just as well without reading it at all. Basically, it seems like not a lot of thought went into coming up with questions that were pedagogically appropriate as follow-ups to the reading passages. So, this may seem like a lot of criticism, but at the end of the day this book still has one huge thing going for it: I don\’t know of any others that serve the same purpose. You\’d think there would be plenty of demand for easy-reading stories with accompanying vocabulary, intended for language learners at various stages of the process, but I can\’t seem to find any. I do have some dual-language books, but that\’s not quite the same thing. And I have a book of fairy tales probably intended for children, but it\’s not as interesting. So despite the flaws of this book, I\’ll probably continue on with the series, just because there\’s no alternative. And for beginners, I\’d definitely recommend Klein\’s Dino stories, starting with Café in Berlin.

Disclosure: I got this for free during some kind of promotion or something, I don\’t know if I would have bought this. I took German for three semesters, the last semester being in the spring of 2008. I speak it to myself sporadically to keep it going, sometimes read articles and get the gist, you know, about proficiency level. I went to Germany and was able to be talk to people who did not speak English while in a stressful situation, but I couldn\’t have a long idle chat with someone. This little story was perfect. I mean, the word that were given at the end of each chapter were words that I did not know (sometimes slang, sometimes idioms, sometimes non-everyday words [like \”corpse\” or \”crime scene\”]). The grammar was appropriate to the level of vocab that was expected. There are a few questions at the end of each chapter that are part comprehension and part making sure you understand the grammar. Answers are at the end of the book so you don\’t accidentally peek too soon. It is very short. I read each chapter two or three times (once without knowing the meaning of the new words; once with them; and once either out loud or silently, whichever I didn\’t do earlier) and it took me a few days of a chapter or two a day. I would totally recommend this to someone in my situation: proficient but rusty, wanting to read something fairly interesting but easy to understand, and wanting to get back into studying German. This is not going to teach you much; it\’s more like the paper you put on top of a fire to make it light quickly and easily.

I really like these short books for learning German. They are interesting and manageable. They work particularly well on Kindle with a German-English dictionary installed so you can just touch a word to pull up the definition.

The format of the book is best suited for young learners as it contains a storyline split into short chapters. As an adult learner I would have preferred a more extensive text. The concept of follow-up questions is good and the questions that referred back to the text were good. However, some questions required the access to a dictionary to be properly answered, which has a bad fit to a young learner, trying to learn a new language. The storyline and the type of language used was more directed towards an adult learner.

I\’m convinced that this is THE way to learn German or any other language. You\’re reading real dialogues, learning about characters and events, in a very simple yet grammatically correct and modern German language. It\’s not the most exciting book you\’ll ever read, but it will not bore you to sleep like the textbooks do.

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