I started an experiment today.
I bought Mariana Leky’s book “Was man von hier aus sehen kann” a while ago, because a German speaker bought it as a present to a German learner, saying it is a wonderful story and with her writing style of repeating something in multiple ways, it could be useful for learning German.
Reading novels is probably not the most effective way of actively learning German and absorbing useful phrases and words in everyday life, so I only treat it merely as an enjoyable and passive activity to immerse oneself in the language.
As expected, it was written in past tense, which is a grammatical tense that I rarely encounter in my German learning journey. The bigger barrier that I found today, was the typically long German sentences, which have a lot of conjunctive verbs, that resulted in a lot of commas per sentence, as well as the verbs that are seperated across a phrase, and this, for English speakers, without knowing the language very well, can cause a tremendous amount of confusion of which phrase or seperated word ending goes with which other part.
Damn.
So I thought I asked ChatGPT to break down a sentence for me.
It did a great job.
I also encountered an interesting word, “erstaunlich”, translated into “amazing”. It is an English word that I use day to day, but I have not registered the German word, so I asked ChatGPT whether it is a commonly used word (or whether it is simply a word that one uses in writing but never in real life).
Reading unfamiliar German texts beyond one’s level can be frustrating, as dictionaries only give a meaning but much less contexts. Just from these two exercises with ChatGPT, it does become an enjoyable activity instead.