Improve your German reading and listening and expand your vocabulary!

This book can be used in many ways. On the one hand, you can sit back and relax, read German and, from time to time, let your eyes wander to the translation and brush up your German this way. In this case, you can skip the chapters about tips for quickly building up your vocabulary, the L-R method and those with many more tips.

Alternately, you can first get an initial overview of the proposed learning methods for effective language learning and the variety of bonus material offered with this book. Try the techniques! You’ll be surprised how quickly your reading and listening skills will improve!

Bonus material offered in this book, Download link for Free MP3

If you send us an EMail, you will get the following free material:

• Download links for the German audiobooks of the short stories
• Download links for an Anki - Deck to learn the most important German vocabulary

About the Short Stories

Edgar Allan Poe paved the way for Gothic crime fiction. Masterfully crafted, his suspenseful stories create an uncanny atmosphere that draws readers into his bizarre world. His fantastic and creepy tales render plausible the implausible. With their tendency toward the macabre and the supernatural, his stories offer an unforgettable reading experience of all shades of horror.

Table of contents (German-English)

• Der Untergang des Hauses Usher - The Fall of the House of Usher
• Die Maske des roten Todes - The Masque of the Red Death
• Das Fass Amontillado - The Cask of Amontillado
• Das schwatzende Herz - The Tell-Tale Heart

Your advantages:

• The original text and the literary translation are placed in parallel vertical columns side by side.
• Therefore you can check almost instantly whether you understand or not. This is ideal to increase your vocabulary significantly very fast.
• So you can truly enjoy the story since you need only a split second to check the translation.
• Rich, alluring language
• Quick vocabulary expansion
• For advanced learners (advanced vocabulary)

Extensive reading and learning German with parallel texts: Why?

Extensive reading means reading a lot in a foreign language. It is not essential to understand every word. You continue to read to find out what happens next. The pleasure of reading is what increases language abilities. Kato Lomb was a Hungarian interpreter who spoke several languages fluently. She described in her book “How I Learn Languages” how she used extensive reading to increase her vocabulary fast.

The American linguist Stephen Krashen has said that free voluntary reading is “the most powerful tool we have in language education”.