The German part of my linguistic autobiography began to develop further in my first semester of graduate school with a course on 20th-century German drama. Plays are good for working on reading skills in a foreign language because they're relatively short, and at first I took notes on any unfamiliar vocabulary in such plays as Frank Wedekind's "Erdgeist" and Georg Kaiser's "Von morgens bis mitternachts". Later in the term, I didn't have time for that anymore, but the first play I read without looking up vocabulary was Bertolt Brecht's "Mutter Courage", which I had read in English at university, and I discovered I could understand German without knowing all the words. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 April 2022)

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My linguistic autobiography: Learning with Bertolt Brecht how to read German without looking up words