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If you travel a lot, you probably have a lot of phrasebooks. Maybe you have become quite adept at looking up a needed phrase, remembering it for ten seconds, successfully uttering said phrase, and then becoming discombobulated as you try to absorb even a single syllable of the response being hurtled at you.

Phrasebooks have their purpose… But can they also be a valuable learning tool in the study of a foreign language? Absolutely! Let us analyze the simple question – Sprechen Sie Deutsch? – and see what can be gleaned.

Phrasebooks are tools for observing the grammatical structure of foreign sentences: First, a word-for-word translation…Speak you German?  There’s the first piece of information, a proper sentence structure for a simple question consisting of a verb, subject, and direct object.  In this case, verb-subject-direct object?  By retaining this structure, many questions can be formed later with additional vocabulary.

Phrasebooks are tools for practicing verb conjugations: From the sample sentence above, we see that the verb used above, sprechen, when conjugated for the pronoun Sie, retains the same form as it does in the infinitive.  Using a phrasebook to its full depth would now involve restating the sentence with a properly conjugated verb for all possible pronouns.

Phrasebooks reveal details about the language: In this example, we might ask, “Why is Sie used for you instead of the du from my conjugation chart?”  Or we might wonder, “Is there a reason that every word in this sentence is capitalized?”  A quick online search will help you understand some of the oddities of the language you are studying.

By using a phrasebook to its full extent, you’ll find yourself having to open it less often!

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