Volume 4 (2013) Issue 2
pp. 139-142
Martin
Durrell: Hammer’s GERMAN Grammar and Usage. London: Hodder
Educational 52011. 553 pages. (ISBN 978 1 444 12016 5)
Years
of language teaching have taught me that a good grammar is worth its
weight in gold but that same experience has taught me that a good
grammar is the last thing that students think of buying. For most,
their school or university course book is the reference work of
choice when problems arise, so a grammar has to be particularly
useful and usable if it is going to persuade students to actually buy
it. To be useful, it has to be a comprehensive and up-to-date
presentation of the language concerned since the average learner
will probably only buy one grammar in a lifetime. To be usable, it
has to have an easily recognisable system of classifying grammatical
features and, most important, a good, reliable index.
First
published in 1971 and now in its fifth edition, Hammer’s German
Grammar and Usage (HGG&U) has gained a reputation as a solid work
of reference for the English-speaking learner who has already
mastered the basics of German and is “serious about studying
German” (blurb on the back cover). This popular and highly-praised
volume has received a number of euphoric 5-star reviews on Amazon,
which reveal quite a lot about the nature of the work: for instance
that it is appreciated for its detail and its use of known
terminology, that generations of the same family are still using it,
both as learners and teachers of German and that it is considered
indispensable for advanced study at a university. So, we can deduce
that it covers German grammar as comprehensively as possible, that it
takes a traditional approach using a well-known descriptive
meta-language and that its continuity over the years is considered a
merit. It is geared to the particular needs of the English speaker,
or, as Durrell states in his preface (p. xiii), the learner using
English as a lingua franca.
In the latter case, a good command of English and insight into
English grammar is certainly necessary.
As
well as being descriptive, HGG&U also highlights the contrasts
between English and German. The first chapter on nouns, for example,
immediately plunges the student into a discussion of gender and why
it will be a problem for the English-speaking learner. Later on,
there are special sections on how to deal with those ubiquitous
English –ing
forms which have no direct equivalent in German or how to cope with
forms which have no direct equivalent in English like the
“subjectless” passive (“Es
wird getanzt” p. 300),
but which are equally ubiquitous in German. Hence, the reader will
probably end up learning quite a lot about the workings of English as
well as German.
In
his preface, Durrell points out that HGG&U follows the
traditional grammar organisational pattern based on parts of speech.
This means that discourse structures beyond word and phrase level and
functional views of grammar cannot really be accommodated. The
approach to grammar does not fit in easily with current ways of
learning a language, be they communicative, interactional or
holistic, where the focus is on using, where possible, prefabricated
units of discourse, “chunks”, which can be “slotted into” the
appropriate context without the necessity for cognitive intervention,
such as checking for gender, case, agreement, etc., which would slow
down communication. The use of formulaic language is considered to
permit learners to grow accustomed to language patterns which are
highly frequent without having to analyse the grammar first. HGG&U
originated during a different language learning paradigm and has a
different goal: its strength lies in enabling the users to analyse
German grammar and to form grammatically correct utterances from the
smallest unit of grammar upwards.
Although
attempts have been made to include spoken language, and Durrell
emphasises this goal in his preface, the examples of spoken usage
appear to have been largely drawn from TV and radio sources rather
than every-day conversation. The author cites the corpus of German
established by the Institut für deutsche Sprache (Mannheim,
Germany), but it is not clear to what extent the spoken corpus served
as a source for the examples of colloquial speech. In any case, the
grammatical items are rarely embedded in stretches of discourse
longer than a single line. This means that some items lack the
context which would be appropriate for understanding the particular
grammatical phenomenon better. Chapter 10 on modal particles is a
case in point: as a predominantly spoken phenomenon, the modal
particles lend themselves well to contextualisation to demonstrate
their use. As they are presented here, however, they appear as a
daunting list of items to be learned by heart rather than expressions
that will add a really important dimension of meaning to an
utterance. This shows once more that HGG&U would appear to be
more appropriate for formal learning environments or self-study
rather than communicative or task-based learning.
Durrell
implies in his preface that he might have undertaken a more thorough
re-write of the book, but preferred to limit revisions largely to
bringing the examples up to date as many “potential” users might
be confused by more radical changes. In fact, had Durrell taken the
opportunity to rework the text more radically, it would no longer be
“Hammer”! Clearly, this would not have been in the publisher’s
interest.
HGG&U
is organised in 23 chapters, each with various subdivisions. Chapter
1 starts with Nouns, covering gender, plural forms and “declension”.
This division is intuitively helpful in some respects, but it is
rather strange that the reader has to wait until Chapter 2, which is
dedicated to the concept of case, in order to discover the
function of declension and why the inflectional tables need to be
studied carefully. Still, Chapter 1 demonstrates the procedure that
will be adopted in all subsequent chapters: after naming the topic,
it is described succinctly in non-technical language and sometimes
accompanied by a learning tip, such as, under Gender, “Foreign
learners are usually recommended to learn German words with their
gender” (p. 1), and, under Plurals, “… to learn the plural of
each noun with the noun” (p. 14), etc. Each chapter and section has
a wealth of examples, as one would expect, given the complexity of
German grammar, most of which are extremely useful, but one wonders
if it is necessary to include examples like
In colloquial German this dative plural –n is sometimes omitted, and one may even see notices such as Eis mit Früchte. [sic] This is considered incorrect. (p. 26).
This
is not an isolated example: HGG&U goes into this level of detail
(albeit using a smaller font) at numerous points, but the question
arises whether it would not be preferable to omit this type of detail
since it may well be confusing for the intermediate student, while
being obvious to the advanced student (cf. also p. 45 on confusing
dative and accusative (…mit
einer Tasse heißen
Tee)
or p. 97, the use of “wo” as a non-standard regionalism (… die
Frau, wo
jetzt kommt)
or p. 233, Southern German regional variations omitting the umlaut (…
sie schlaft)).
Especially for less competent learners, a focus on the essential
features, without mentioning unusual items which may occur in spoken
German, but which many students will never encounter, would seem more
useful.
Returning
to the chapter overview, HGG&U continues with chapters related to
the noun phrase. Chapter 3 on Personal Pronouns has a pertinent
discussion on du
and Sie,
also including the archaic use of Er
and Sie
as pronouns of address. This could easily have been omitted, being
another item that students are unlikely to encounter except in older
literature where the meaning will be obvious. Translations into
English of the examples under “impersonal es”,
such as “es fehlt mir an Geld”, would have been more useful.
Chapter 4, The Articles, covers the differences between English and
German usage comprehensively, but then again, it is not clear why some
examples are translated and others not. Chapter 5 deals with Other
Determiners and Pronouns while Chapter 6 covers Adjectives and
Chapter 7, Adverbs. Chapter 8 covers Comparison of Adjectives and
Adverbs with Chapter 9 on Numerals, followed by Chapter 10 on Modal
Particles and Chapter 11 on Expressions of Time.
Chapter
11 is partly a preview of Chapter 20 on Prepositions but also
includes the adverbials (cf. Chapter 7) frequently used in time
expressions, but its position in the table of contents appears to be
unjustified on any logical grounds. Martin Durrell himself states that
he had considered dividing the material between the adverbials and
preposition chapters but, with the user in mind, decided in favour of
retaining the chapter as originally conceived. From a learner's perspective, it is probably true that Expressions of Time are more
usefully clustered in the manner given in Chapter 11 as learners are
quite likely to need a complete overview of the topic, rather than
leafing through different chapters. It might have been better,
however, to shift this chapter in its entirety to the end of the book
as an appendix, as it does not fit in well with the parts-of-speech
organisation. The same could be said for Chapter 10 on Modal Particles, which is placed before any of the “verb” chapters.
It seems strange to speak about speaker intentions and attitudes
before clause structure has been discussed. Granted, some of these
particles function as adverbs (cf. p. 176), but, generally speaking,
their meanings become clearer when they are embedded in a longer
stretch of discourse which includes clauses.
Chapter
12 deals with verb conjugation with of all the tenses and the
principle parts of strong and irregular verbs. On p. 230, the option
of omitting the “-e” in the imperative of “warte”
is not given along with other examples of this phenomenon although
this is quite frequent in spoken German. In this chapter, we find a
definition of “separable” verbs but not before the concept of
“inseparable” verbs has been slipped in, without comment. Both of
these types of verb are dealt with in detail later (Ch. 22), but it
would be worthwhile briefly defining the distinction when the
“inseparables” are first introduced. At this point (p. 233), the
typography, which is generally excellent, is somewhat confusing as
the alphabetic listing gets entangled with the (Roman) numeric
listing, so (i) (intended to be alphabetic) follows (iii) (as a
numeral). A further confusion arises on p. 235: we learn here that
the “past participle of the modal auxiliaries is rarely used”,
which is true enough, only to learn on p. 269 that the past
participle is “occasionally” used (“sie
hat arbeiten gemusst”),
but that such usage is regarded as incorrect. This attention to
unnecessary detail has already been mentioned as confusing as well as
a waste of space: the focus should be unambiguously on contemporary
German, rather than archaisms, and certainly not on incorrect and
infrequent usage.
Chapter
13 takes up the use of the infinitive and the ways of dealing with
English –ing-forms. This is a complex topic for
English-speaking students to come to terms with, but the presentation
is clear and well-illustrated. The same can be said of Chapter 14,
Uses of Tenses, where the lack of continuous / progressive
tenses and differences in past tense use requires systematic study.
Chapter 15 covers The Passive, while Chapter 16, on Mood,
introduces the learner to the imperative and the subjunctive. Here
students are warned to be on their guard (p. 316) as “even educated
native speakers [of German] are often uncertain and insecure” about
how to use the subjunctive. HGG&U sensibly adopts German
terminology, Konjunktiv I und Konjunktiv II, to
describe the use of the subjunctive rather than using the English
terminology, which English speakers are unlikely to know, and so
reducing the complexity of the topic without oversimplifying it. On
the whole, this chapter presents the topic clearly, with a number of
interesting examples drawn from the press.
As
I started reading HGG&U at p. 1 and then continued to the end,
rather than dipping in, I was possibly more sensitive than normal
users to the order of the chapters. In Chapter 16, we learn on p. 324
that when the word dass
is omitted in reported speech, the subordinate clause word
order reverts to the main
clause order. Although the appropriate cross reference is given,
sentence patterns
are not covered until Chapter 18, the Verb
Valency chapter. Main and
subordinate clause word order could surely have been mentioned
earlier even if there are reasons to postpone the detailed analysis
of word order in general (also in Chapter 21) towards the end of the
book.
Chapter
18, Valency, and Chapter 21, Word Order, are key
chapters for the English-speaking learner on account of the tricky
verb complementation patterns with prepositions, the position of the
finite verb in main and subordinate clauses and the order of verbs at
the end of the sentence. Table 21.1, which gives a clear summary of
basic German word order in sentences, could well have been placed in
a more prominent position, or even as an appendix for quick and easy
reference. Otherwise these two chapters are very clear and
informative, especially the note on the time-honoured
time-manner-place rule for the order of adverbials, which all
learners are taught but which is actually misleading. As is often the
case, simple rules of thumb do not stand up to a thorough
examination.
For
the sake of a complete overview, Chapter 19 covers Conjunctions
and Subordination, Chapter
20, Prepositions
and Chapter 22, Word
Formation with helpful tips
on neologisms, especially from English. Chapter 23 is a substantially
revised chapter on Spelling,
Pronunciation and Punctuation.
This concludes the Grammar and fills the reader in on the
controversies surrounding the spelling reform. Durrell succeeds in
demystifying much of the confusion though capitalisation (or not) in
preposition plus noun compounds (e.g. anhand
vs. an Hand)
still remains vague even to L1 speakers, as shown in various recently
published sources. The alternative spellings of so
dass and sodass
have been noted, but the essential meaning difference is relegated to
a totally different chapter since this is a conjunction rather than
an adverb like the other so-
compounds. Nevertheless it is retrievable with the help of the
reliable cross-referencing. Punctuation rules are dealt with clearly
and the L2 student following them may well fare better than many a
German L1 student, if my experience with student texts in Austria is
anything to go by.
My
reading of HGG&U was influenced both by my role as a learner of
German as well as that of a language professional. So I had a very
close look at the section where I detect my own particular bugbear –
the gender of nouns. While case
(in Chapter 2) in German may be considered to be a problem for
learners with an L1 such as English, which has relatively little
morphology in comparison, the true problem in hitting the correct
case ending is sorting out the gender in the first place so that the
correct ending can be added. What appears to be a violation of the
case system is, more often than not, the right case ending but the
wrong gender. This does not help much, but analysing the cause is
sometimes half of the solution.
Right
on page one, Durrell informs us that in 80% of German nouns, the
gender can be recognised by the noun’s meaning, form (esp. ending)
or plural formation. This reassuring news led me to believe I would
finally be able to crack the gender problem with Prof. Durrell’s
help. You may not have thought about this before, but makes of cars
are all masculine – analogy with der
Wagen?
Hence, if you encounter die
BMW, it refers to a
motorbike (das Motorrad).
Then there are names of rivers. Rivers inside Germany are all
feminine (p. 2), with a few exceptions (p. 3), whereas the rivers
outside Germany are mostly masculine (p. 2), except for those that
end in “–e”.
But what about die Wolga
or der Rhein?
And then there are those rivers “in regions which are no longer in
Germany, Austria or Switzerland” (Durrell 2011:3) – whatever that
may mean – which have native German names, and hence are feminine,
apart from quite a few exceptions. Here we see that assigning gender
is far from easy and that the 80% “promise” will still involve a
lot of cognitive effort. “Gender” continues for the next ten
pages, which may not seem a lot, but could take a lifetime for me to
digest. This, however, may have more to do with the German language
itself rather than HGG&U’s presentation of it.
There
are clearly different reasons for choosing a grammar. For many
students, a well-designed textbook will suffice, obviating the need
for any additional reference work, so the question arises as to how
such a grammar will complement the textbook and how it will be used
in the context of the learning situation. Current approaches to
second language learning (irrespective of the language concerned)
tend to foreground communication, allowing the learners to use the
language in simple situations at an early stage in the learning
process. In this context, HGG&U may well be considered too
daunting, seeing that it requires a knowledge of the grammatical
meta-language and plenty of time for study.
Nevertheless,
it is certainly the case that if used exclusively as a reference
grammar by students who know at least basic German, the main
criterion is ultimately the usefulness of the index in finding what
you need to know quickly. In this case, the index worked extremely
well in my spot checks: it appears to be comprehensive and the
typographical highlighting of the different types of entry is very
helpful.
Weighing
about 1200 grams, HGG&U is relatively light in comparison with
the Cambridge Grammar of
English, with just over
half the number of pages, but this miracle has only been achieved by
filling some pages to the very bottom (e.g. pp. 511-513), allowing
virtually no space for margin notes. I mention this perhaps trivial
detail because nowadays the obvious attraction of having a bound book
rather than an electronic format is the possibility of adding one’s
own examples or mnemonics. Apart from this problem of layout, the
text is thankfully virtually so free of typos that it is almost
ungracious to mention the missing “l” in “Henkel [sic]
trocken” (p. 120]
Reading
Hammer’s GERMAN Grammar and Usage has been a fascinating
experience, taking me back to my first German lessons as I recognised
some of the very example sentences that I encountered decades ago. A
comparison of this with contemporary English grammar teaching, where
rules are less prominent, shows how different approaches to the
learning of grammar can be and probably need to be. Although I find
the accumulation of “rules” rather intimidating and miss the
contexualisation of examples, I realise that, for the teacher or
learner who has few opportunities for communicating with German
speakers, the wealth of detail is actually its strength. In a
subversive kind of way, I find it difficult to escape the attraction
of this grammar, and while I shan’t be keeping it under my bed, as
one of the Amazon reviewers advocates, it will certainly find a
prominent place on my reference shelf and I can heartily recommend it
for grammar junkies.
Reviewer:
Prof.
Dr. Veronica Smith
Alpen-Adria
Universität Klagenfurt
Institut
für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Universitätsstraße
65-67
A-9020
Klagenfurt
E-mail:
veronica.smith@aau.at