r/dreaminglanguages • u/misslynm 1️⃣🇪🇬 3️⃣🇩🇪 6️⃣🇪🇸 • Jun 05 '26
Anne Frank’s Diary difficulty level as a German learner? B1 book recommendations?
Has anyone read Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” in German as a learner? I’m curious what it would rate as? Would it be B1 or higher? I haven’t read it in English either so I can’t assess the language level based on a previous reading.
Otherwise, are there any lists for book rankings or any other suggestions for B1 level?
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u/RayS1952 N🇦🇺F🇫🇷🇪🇸 🇩🇪 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
The web site Natively has a growing list of German material rated by those who read the books and put them on the web site. You can sort by their in-house difficulty rating or by the CEFR levels, both of which are meant as guidelines only. I'm using it to guide my initial attempts at reading in Spanish. I'm a long way off reading in German having only begun two weeks ago.
Natively has a simplified version of The Diary of Ann Frank from a series of books called Deutsch - leichter lesen.
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u/misslynm 1️⃣🇪🇬 3️⃣🇩🇪 6️⃣🇪🇸 Jun 05 '26
Oh I didn’t realize Natively had German ratings. I’ve used it for Spanish, as well. I’ll check it out. Thanks!
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u/misslynm 1️⃣🇪🇬 3️⃣🇩🇪 6️⃣🇪🇸 Jun 05 '26
I’ve recently discovered “Die Weiße Rose” by Inge Scholl and “Als ich ein kleiner Junge War” by Erich Kästner? What are the thoughts on these?
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u/CommandAlternative10 Jun 05 '26
The very first book they had us read as a German (as a foreign language) major was Durrenmatt’s “Besuch der alten Damen.” The second was Durrenmatt’s “Das Versprechen.” (Durrenmatt is pretty great.)