German Science Reader by Charles Frederick Kroeh is a book on learning scientific German. However, I learn better aurally. What are some good audio resources for learning scientific German?
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2After starting to read the HTML version of the book you linked to I believe it is just a random collection of poorly written paragraphs on various maths, physics or chemistry topics reminiscent of my school books when I was much younger. Sadly there are so many errors that I can hardly recommend it to anybody who needs this for serious scientific publications.– TakkatNov 27, 2014 at 22:06
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@Takkat: Thanks for pointing that out. I'm not good enough at German to know whether it's poorly written or not. Are Scholz's or Gore's books, for example, any better? thanks– GeremiaNov 27, 2014 at 23:25
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@Takkat: could it be that the German is somewhat off because it seems to have been published in 1907? ;)– GerhardNov 28, 2014 at 0:48
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1@Geremia I guess a century leaves its traces in any language, and the 20th brought about dramatic change with 2 world wars, changing borders several times in the German speaking area, significant sociological developements - times have changed, and so did the language– HulkNov 28, 2014 at 6:05
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1There are a number of recorded lectures available at timms.uni-tuebingen.de/Themen/Themen.aspx.– painfulenglishNov 28, 2014 at 22:53
1 Answer
If what you mean by scientific German is the German Bildungssprache, a recorded lecture in any subject will be an ideal resource. There is a website which offers MOOCs in German and I am sure you can find more resources of this kind. If you don't care about the content and just want a lot of very beautiful, sophisticated and precise German, I recommend podcasts in the legal disciplines (for example from LMU Munich). In my view, German legal vocabulary is where beauty and precision are most concentrated, and the discipline is less prone to loanwords so that what you learn is originally German most of the time, which is not the case in the vast majority of other sciences.
If, however, you mean scientific terminology in a strict sense, a very substantial part of that is based on Latin and Greek and thus quite similar across languages ("Homoscedasticity", "Homoscédasticité", "Homocedasticidad", "Homoskedastizität" etc.) and it would be best to look for a book on the etymology of scientific terminology.