Fairy Tales and Stories for Beginners. Part Two

Hélène Adeline Guerber (H. A. Guerber)Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.6

Word count: 301K words
Chapters: 31

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Märchen und Erzählungen für Anfänger. Zweiter Teil by H. A. Guerber. Author: Guerber, H. A. (Hélène Adeline), 1859–1929. Language: German. Class: PF: Language and Literatures: West Germanic. Release Date: March 23, 2014

Editor's review

This is the second volume of H. A. Guerber's Märchen und Erzählungen für Anfänger (Fairy Tales and Stories for Beginners), a public-domain eBook from Project Gutenberg. As a language-learning reader, its main value lies in simplified fairy tales and narrative texts that give beginning German readers comprehensible, continuous material, helping them build vocabulary and grow familiar with sentence patterns within story contexts rather than memorizing words in isolation. Compared with the first volume, the second usually advances in length and language difficulty, making it suitable as a bridge in graded reading. Guerber long wrote accessible works on history and language, and the style here is clear and plain rather than heavily literary, which is friendly to beginners. In practice it suits classroom support, self-study routines, or German initiation during shared family reading. Note that this is a public-domain electronic text without audio or answer keys, so readers should pair it with a dictionary or learning tools.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Beginners with basic German pronunciation and introductory grammar
German self-learners who want to reinforce vocabulary through story texts
Teachers who need supplementary graded readers for German classes
Readers interested in European fairy tales and simplified narratives

Not a good fit for

Readers with no German at all who have not yet learned the alphabet and pronunciation
Exam candidates seeking bilingual annotations or exercises
Advanced readers looking for unabridged literary classics

Reading tips

Read through once without looking up words to grasp the gist, then read again paragraph by paragraph checking new words.
After each piece, retell the plot in three German sentences to test comprehension.
Compile recurring verbs and connectives into a personal word list and review it regularly.
Read the same text along with audio resources to practice phrasing and language feel.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book suitable for someone who has never studied German?

Not really. The title says it is for Anfänger (beginners), but the main body is still German text, and readers should at least know letter pronunciation and basic grammar; otherwise even looking up words and parsing sentences becomes difficult. Complete beginners are advised to finish an introductory course first.

How does the second volume relate to the first?

It is the second volume of the same graded series and usually goes further than the first in vocabulary and sentence length. If you have the first volume, read them in order; if you already have some German, you can start directly with the second.

Does the electronic edition include audio or exercises?

As is usual for public-domain eBooks, the main text is textual and comes without audio or accompanying exercises. Readers can look for read-aloud resources themselves or turn the stories into fill-in-the-blank or question-and-answer practice.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Hélène Adeline Guerber (H. A. Guerber) Author · American · 1859–1929

Hélène Adeline Guerber (1859–1929), who wrote under the name H. A. Guerber, was an American author, historian and teacher. She was born in Mount Clemens, Michigan, to Swiss-born parents and died in Montclair, New Jersey. She never married and devoted herself to retelling myths, legends, folktales and history for young readers and general audiences. Drawing on the Eddas and sagas of the Norse, Greek and Roman mythology, medieval legends, Wagner's operas and American colonial history, her books are clear in structure and readable in style, combining narrative appeal with reliable information and making difficult sources accessible to beginners. Ten of her works are held here, including Myths of the Norsemen, Myths of Greece and Rome and The Book of the Epic. With more than twenty books, many still reprinted, she left a lasting influence on the popularization of classical and medieval culture.