Because of the time consuming nature of studying theological german, I have contemplated selling a vocabulary list that would be composed of over 1000 words in excel spreadsheet form specific to theological german in order to quickly scroll and therefore reduce the amount of time spent in looking up words in a dictionary. Can anyone tell me if they would find this useful or would most prefer to simply thumb through a paper dictionary? I would appreciate the input.
Thanks,
Bryan
I would find a list like that extremely valuable as a quick reference tool when reading and translating. If the price was right I would be very interested in purchasing a copy.
Was für eine gute Idee!
It would be useful, I think. Assuming the price was reasonable, I would buy such a list.
Here’s a book that’s been around for 40 years: “Introduction to Theological German: A Beginner’s Course for Theological Students” and it’s available on Amazon. The book is sort of an intro to German based on theological vocabulary, but it’s of more benefit to those who already have a little bit of German under their belt. Typeface is typewriter-like: unattractive, yet easy to tolerate when you consider your goals. By no means will this brief paperback prove to be the perfect book for every reader of this website. Some will think it’s too short (112 pp); others might already know most of the theological German (about 20-25 pages of vocab, as well as a brief grammatical index). There are 20 chapters. The first 10 focus on verses from a few different German bibles. The remaining 10 have 1 to 3 reading passages having to do with theology, doctrine, commentary, etc. written by various German writers, e.g. Schlatter, Holtzmann, Barth, Althaus, Bultmann, etc. Each passage in all 20 chapters is followed by grammatical and syntactical helps.
It’s an interesting book, but if anyone buys it, keep all your other reference books on the table: German and English bibles, even the Luther-ESV German/English Parallel Bible, a good dictionary, a decent German grammar book, Ziefel’s Modern Theological German, and whatever else helps. Just keep plugging away.
Oh, Bryan, I got carried away about describing the little book of theological German. So, back to your question…
Yes, the Excel spreadsheet might be of great benefit to most everyone. Anyone could download it and, as time marches on, delete some words and add others, thereby customizing it to one’s own purposes.
Bryan et al.,
I’m new to this website, so I have not taken the time to read absolutely EVERY single post. Therefore, I have no idea if the following has been mentioned before. If it has, it might not hurt to have it mentioned again. I just came across this. Looks like it has about 50 bazillion words in it:
“German-English Dictionary of Religion and Theology”
http://www.dictionary-theologicalgerman.org/index.php?letter=H
It would obviously depend on the price, but I would find such an electronic resource useful.
I can go both ways. I often use dict.cc which may be a bit faster than excel. Though I get tired of looking at the internet when I translate. How much would you sell the list for?
That would be quite interesting for German translators. Any new developments with regards to your project?
I have such an Excel list of over 4,000 German word entries with English meanings, with focus on theological terms. But I never use it when I translate because any online dictionary is faster and likely provides more detailed information, e.g. dict.cc as mentioned above or http://conjd.cactus2000.de/ for verb conjugations. Also, this here is a good dictionary that a friend just showed me today, although it is probably not that strong in theological terms: http://dict.uni-leipzig.de/
However, as a first-language German speaker any such list is less useful to me anyway. But I still think that any student of German would be better served with online dictionaries. (OrthodoxerChrist, thanks for that outstanding dictionary you linked to. I’ve never seen it before.)
Thanks for the pointer, Samuel. Good new online dictionaries are always welcome. I order to SELL vocabulary lists I think you would have to talk about larger sizes; 1000 words is not a lot. As a translator, the chance that the word I am looking for pops up in a list of 1000 is very small.