#nature method

for context: I know no German. zero, nothing.

so. ok, and I want to learn German, that's the other thing.

I wanted to see if there were any "Natural Method" textbooks, similar to something like Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, but for German.

basically, books that both assume no prior German knowledge, and are also written entirely in German, with the goal being to use marginal notes and illustrations and context to convey understanding without the reader ever having to appeal to their first language.

The nature method textbooks were designed to be read, and if you knew a similar language you were meant to rely on cognates and the pictures to understand the whole textbook. The lessons would gradually introduce new words (around 3000) in context, and new grammar.

I want to share something awesome! A girl tried out the same nature method textbook I did. Her video is short so I recommend just checking it out:

She also linked the nature method resources in her summary, which I will paste below:

Nature Method books (English, French, Italian, German): https://drive.google.com/drive/folder... Similar books for Spanish (for online viewing): https://archive.org/details/pocopocoe... https://archive.org/details/allspanis...   / irish_via_the_nature_method   Audio (English, French, German, Italian): ‪@freetongue‬ Shoutout to Free Tongue for providing all this free, quality audio! French Nature Method playlist:    • Le Français par la Méthode Nature  

I read half of Le Francais par la Methode Nature, years ago, and it helped push me to being able to read graded readers I had and then eventually anything I picked up in French. I loved the book. I loved learning to read BY reading in the language immediately, learning a language BY doing stuff in the language immediately. I love learning through context, so I loved the style of these nature method textbooks and wish there were more modern ones being used. Lingua Latina for Latin is the only nature method textbook I'm sure is still being used in some classes.

I ended up finding print copies of the French version, the Italian version, and a similar styled book called the All Spanish Method.

I used the audio of Le Francais par la Methode Nature made by Ayan Academy on youtube, like her, to work on my listening skills a few years after reading the textbook. I still would like to both finish reading and listening to this textbook. I feel it got me to B1 level and then I just kind of jumped into reading other stuff I was interested in, and my reading skills improved but none of my other skills did lol.

If you like the style of the textbook, I really recommend these nature method textbooks. If you use them, using them the way she describes she studied them in her video is probably the best way. I just read and listened, and it helped my passive skills but I definitely want to go back and do the production exercises one day.

Be aware they're OLD textbooks, 70+ years old at this point, so some information and words may be out of date. I partly read the textbook when I first did because I was curious what differences there were in an older textbook, what things they taught differently, how they spoke about history and values, which is why I have a big collection of old textbooks at home. I'm into looking at that kind of stuff.

(I once had a horrifically bad chinese textbook from right in the middle of the simplification of characters, so some were simplified and some weren't, and the textbook only had a whopping 100 words it taught which really upset me... on the other hand I have an amazing Chinese Grammar textbook from 1930 that uses 了 only ever pronounced as 'liao' and only uses nin for you, but it's grammar and hanzi explanations are some of the clearest I've ever read).

Well the nature method textbooks were used most from 1920s - 1960s, and the older ones are often the Direct Method (mislabeled by someone as Nature Method) which involved a lot of dialogues in the target language but were not necessarily designed to be understandable without a teacher. Nature Method textbooks are designed to be understandable without a teacher, with just the context of the textbook and visuals, and assume the student knows a similar language to the target language already (so it assumes students know Spanish or Italian or French or English or German already).

Nature Method textbooks usually have more context and cognates in the beginning chapters. Direct Method textbooks usually have plenty of dialogues, and sometimes plenty of pictures to teach the words, but ultimately assume a teacher is teaching many words and grammar and so grammar is not explained in the context of long form stories like it is in nature method. I like Nature Method more. Direct method is okay, Poco a Poco is an example of a direct method textbook. Le Francais par la Methode Nature is an example of a nature method textbook.

Information about the old Nature Method institute's textbooks. Note: Lingua Latina is still being published and can be bought from the official publisher. The other nature method textbooks are either out of print (and can be found online if you look), or are being printed by a few companies making them easier to access again (I found a company printing the All Spanish Method since I wanted a print copy badly). This rather long page also mentions some newer books which have come out since for Russian in a nature method like style, which is the first I've heard about: "In addition, we have Marianna Avery’s Сорока (Soroka) children’s books, as well as Stanislav Chernyshov’s Поехали! (Poekhali!) books. There is a new course entitled Дорога в Россию (The Way to Russia) by V.E. Antonova, M.M. Nakhabina, and M.V. Safronova, too. There is also Ignaty Dyakov’s series of books, Рассказ Сенсация (The Story of Sensation), Рассказ Провокация (The Story of Provocation), and Рассказ Канонизация (The Story of Canonisation), to which learners sing praises. Still, though, darn it, I want to find Uncle Oleg’s course!"

But tumblr ate the last post.

So if you'd be interested in me posting the links for the nature method books, let me know.

Semi related: im looking into if i can find a Russian by the Nature Method old book, thats been lost to time for decades. Ayan Academy on youtube (and on their site) seems to hunt down and gather a lot of these type of textbooks, and they have some russian ones, so maybe i can locate a russian nature method textbook by following what trails theyve found.

Ilya Recently I found a collection of The Natural Approach study resources! It’s amazing! Its got links for learning through comprehensible input for several languages, and includes many resources I’ve mentioned before like Comprehensible Input French, Ayan Academy, Le Francais Par Le Methode Nature, Frank Method, along with stuff I hadn’t found before! 

Awesome Natural Approach - https://github.com/IvanovCosmin/awesome-natural-approach

This is a natural approach resource someone designed for japanese, which is really cool because its the first of it’s kind I’ve seen for an asian language (I would love more nature approach/comprehensible input resources for languages like japanese, chinese, korean etc). I’ve explored this site and truly it is comprehensible input if you can read kana. Its a wonderful resource and I’ve been going through it to see how much it teaches - I would be in heaven if a resource like this ultimately aims to cover as many words as Le Francais Par Le Methode Nature does. In my dream world many languages would have a resource that covers as much as that book ToT. I’m really excited by the project below, and I still would desperately love to figure out how to make a similar resource for chinese one day.

DrDru’s Lab https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html

Ilya Frank’s Reading Method (japanese - but it has several other language resources): http://english.franklang.ru/index.php/japanese/11-japanese-folk-tales

Wasabi-jpn (not a nature method resource, but it has phenomenal free lessons for japanese with audio and text and translations): https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/

DeFrancis Chinese Readers audio files (while the books are really good graded reading material, they’re old and out of print and hard to get copies of, and I highly recommend the audio files on their own - they’re clear enough to study from even without accompanying text, just like FSI’s language course audios are useful even without the accompanying text. The material is incredibly dry, but if you need tone drills, sound drills, drills of simple common words and graded listening material that gradually increases in difficulty, its a plentiful resource): http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=31539&TPN=3

Legend of Fei audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1iN411d7M6

Tian Ya Ke audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1t7sB?p=11&spm_id_from=pageDriver

Modu audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gb4y1e7z8?from=search&seid=16682226077510869656&spm_id_from=333.337.0.0

Guardian audiobook: https://music.163.com/#/djradio?id=791802378&order=2&_hash=programlist&limit=100&offset=0

Guardian audiobook (deep voice): https://fm.qq.com/show/rd002ED4aN0mYz2L__

Night by U (Bai Yu): https://www.ximalaya.com/renwenjp/42190598/

Webnovel site jjwxc (it has a LOT of webnovels, is the place a ton of danmei authors post on, also one of my favorite pingxie fanfiction writers posts their stories here. Good for keeping up to date on newer stuff, following authors, supporting authors, and finding what’s popular) https://www.jjwxc.net/

Daomubiji novel site (I don’t think it has some of the really new novels though): http://www.daomubiji.org/

Zhenhunxiaoshuo (this lovely site has a ton of danmei novels backed up, along with a ton of romance novels in general backed up, while https://www.jjwxc.net/ is the go to for keeping up with novels, buying new chapters and supporting authors, zhenhunxiaoshuo has back ups and is nice for if chapters have been censored/taken down/changed or full stories have been deleted, zhenhunxiaoshuo also has the print chapters of some novels if you’re trying to find a limited-run extra online. Also if you’re just trying to find a new danmei author or story, everything on there is solid, then you can use the title or author to go search for more. As its named for zhenhun, it seems to prioritize backing up everything by priest in particular. I’ve often gone there when looking for chapters or extras that were missing from either a print novel I owned or another site I’d been reading on. For the learners and translators - it works really well with a lot of text to audio, click dictionary, mtl tools, it has none of the weird text partly not registering/not showing up issues that some hosting sites have).

MTLnovel (I know people like to look down on mtl novels, although to be fair a lot of novels still are untranslated and mtls get used until better translations are made - and sometimes some wonderful person makes an Edited mtl to fix some glaring errors, until a better translation gets made. Well, if you have to read an MTL, I recommend this site. It hosts a LOT of webnovels, seems to use Google Translate as far as I can tell so its not awful considering I know apps like Readibu use Google Translate too - though far from ideal. Its biggest benefit though is you can make an account, then click ‘RAW’ at the top of chapters and read a parallel text chinese text with the english MTL. As a learner it means a TON of convieniently made parallel readers with the click of a button and is easier than copy/pasting each section you’re reading into some translator and looking back and forth to compare. It has each line of chinese followed by the english mtl, so its well suited for following along with an audiobook or just comparing the chinese text to the translation to figure something out. If you’re a translator and know some chinese already but use MTL as a first-pass on texts, I found this feature useful so I could quickly read the original chinese and notice glaring errors like wrong gender or the mtl totally misunderstanding a sentence/phrase. Then I could narrow in and just work more on translating those specific parts with issues, instead of either missing them by thinking the MTL was fine or wasting a lot more time on parts that read-okay when there were messier sections that needed to be worked on. I just think the ability to quickly compare the original to a line by line MTL makes it easier to comb through errors in an MTL, if you’re trying to make an edited MTL translation for people or relying on MTL to help. And again, as a learner, a lot of the less great click-dictionaries like LingQ and Readibu use Google Translate anyway, so its nice to have a site that uses it but also separates it into easier readable chunks to compare with the original. About 6 months into learning Chinese I used mtlnovel to translate 10 chapters of Silent Reading for myself, because the translation was unfinished at the time. It was a slog as a beginner but the site absolutely helped me not drown. If you’re a person who ends up interested in a lot of chinese-only novels, this site’s a nice collective resource until better person-done translations get made) https://www.mtlnovel.com/

Deepl.com (a translator. Its not perfect by any means, and I have found times when it gets things Worse than Google Translate or Baidu. But me and a few others have used this to just BULK mtl a novel that has no translation yet. Like The Wolf and The Rebel Princess’s novels. And overall, it doesn’t tend to get to many errors - it still makes the he/she mistake which is fixable, but otherwise it mostly only has issues of somewhat misunderstanding complex phrases/sentences. It rarely spits out a Really Wrong word definition, whereas Google Translate regularly spits out a Very Wrong translation for a lot of commonly used words. Also unlike Baidu Translate which seems to simplify down phrases unless you are just translating one small section at a time, DeepL tends to keep most details in its MTL instead of simplifying. It still simplifies a bit, but I think that's just a sad issue with chinese to english MTL. Basically, overall DeepL is likely to give you a very readable text with few glaring issues that would cause frustration - only the he/she and names might need fixing - and then will give few enough major errors in meaning that you’ll still retain the gist correct plot of the novel. I cannot necessarily say the same for Google Translate, so usually when I use Google Translate I also use Baidu or Yandex and compare. If you’re trying to whip up a parallel text for yourself real fast with a machine translation, I’d recommend DeepL. But if you know of a better mtl that still retains most details and doesn’t give a ton of glaring errors, please let me know.) https://www.deepl.com/translator

Baidu Translate (I highly recommend pasting in a URL and getting the whole webpage bulk translated, if you’re attempting to keep the text from being as simplified. I recommend pasting in individual sentences and paragraphs if you suspect simplifying is happening, and baidu will give you footnotes below your translation of expanded translations of various parts. I think baidu Usually is fairly good at getting the overall meaning of a translation. However baidu Really frustrates me, because it clearly has the CAPACITY to retain idioms and longer turns of phrase but instead will cut out idioms and oversimplify when it spits out a translation Bigger than only the idiom/phrase. So something like ‘stiff as a coffin’ baidu may translate to ‘scared’. You lose a lot of detail when it does that constantly. 

Translations come out like this. Baidu is more likely to retain specifically correct word translations than Google Translate - for one thing Google Translate tends to get some really common words brutally wrong and if you’re a learner you will notice - but the longer the translation, the more likely Baidu is to start cutting translations you see below in its footnotes and then turn them into simplified shorter phrases on the right hand side. If you are using Baidu to MTL before you translate further yourself, its worth comparing the actual chinese to the actual MTL it spits out and seeing what stuff it simplified. Like DeepL, Baidu occasionally struggles with longer phrases/sentences and mistranslates them, but if you break down the sentence into individual words it will handle each word fine.) https://fanyi.baidu.com/#zh/en/

Various alternate sites to find cnovels (when you can’t find a chapter somewhere else, need to translate and copy paste, etc): https://www.sto.cx/list-mbook-44-1-0.html (sto.cx seems to have a LOT including fanfictions backed up, however it has some features which sometimes break text-to-audio functions and click-dictionary functions), https://www.mengruan.com/ (mengruan has some cnovels along with translations of things like The Little Prince, Agatha Christie, etc). If you search a novel’s chinese name followed by “小说在线” in a search engine, you will find a lot of alternative sites that host said novel, if you need to search for alternatives which work correctly for whatever tools you’re using (if you’re using a click dictionary or text to speech or google translate etc).

Bilibili Comics (if you’re looking for manhua, bilibili generally hosts a TON especially the new release stuff, just change the language at the top to Chinese) https://www.bilibilicomics.com/ There are alternative manga hosting sites, but honestly webtoons and bilibili are the most reliable and are the official hosts of a lot. However if again for your needs you need an alternative, search the manhua title in chinese then “ 在线” zaixian and you will find some alternative hosts in the results that may work better for you. In general though I’ve found its easy to find the official chinese releases, and its only for finding unofficial manhua translations in english that I’ve had to dig and really look around. 

Various sites to find audio books, audio dramas (有声读物 youshengduwu and  有声读物在线 youshengduwu zaixian are your friends. Go to a search engine and search the chinese name plus one of those phrases, and you will find potential audio even if its not on one of the bigger sites - that’s how I found daomubiji audiobooks. Its worth searching youtube or bilibili first as they have a lot of audio that’s easier to find. https://music.163.com/ , https://fm.qq.com/ , https://www.ximalaya.com/ are the big 3 sites to find audiobooks specifically, and they work fine in computer and phone web browsers if you can’t download their apps in your region. Ximalaya often has official productions, and music.163 and qq have a lot of fans who make audios. https://www.missevan.com/ is a good site for finding audio dramas, as well as bilibili and youtube. Youtube is the most likely to have english subs on the audio dramas if you need them, and if you click the button below the videos on missevan - or the similar looking button on bilibili below videos -  sometimes videos have chinese captions at the bottom of the video.)