Interpreter Strip — German Practice

A single-page web guide that helps a Scout or adult leader prepare for the four requirements of the Scouting America Interpreter strip in German.

The requirements

Youth and adults may wear the Interpreter strip by showing their knowledge of a foreign language or sign language by carrying on a five-minute conversation in the language, translating a two-minute speech or address, writing a letter in the language (this one does not apply for sign language), and translating 200 words from the written word.

What this is, and what it is not

Three of the four requirements need a live witness: a counselor has to hear the conversation, hear the translated address, and read the letter. This guide does not certify anyone and does not pretend to. It is preparation scaffolding — prompts, drills, and reference answers the learner reveals only after their own attempt, plus a head start on the vocabulary English speakers already half-know.

Six views: an overview of the requirements, a Patterns course that teaches seven high-yield rules for reading German above an A1 level, a conversation prep with topic cards and a five-minute timer, two speeches to translate with references, a letter module with German conventions and a model, and two 200-word translation drills. The four requirement sections are designed to build on each other — the conversation plants words used in the speech, the speech plants words used in the letter, the letter plants the format reused in the translation.

Approach

The floor is a learner who has finished an A1 class. Rather than drill vocabulary, the guide teaches the patterns that connect English and German — identical cognates, verb cousins, the th→d sound shift, the small glue words, sound-alikes, and a few pronunciation tricks — then gives them German text built to be read with those patterns. Most words in each passage are reachable by a taught pattern, a function word, or basic A1 vocabulary, with only a handful needing context. tools/coverage.py measures this against the mutual-intelligibility catalog. Teach the pattern, then give text it unlocks.

Content sources

All German is original, written for this guide at an A1 reading level: two 200-word translation passages, a welcome address, a model letter, and the conversation prompts. The seven patterns and the false-friend warnings are drawn from the English–German mutual-intelligibility pattern catalog.

All practice material lives in content.js as data, separated from the app shell, so adding a new source is a data edit, not a code change. Add an entry to SOURCES and reference it by sourceId from a new passage or speech.

Running it

Static files, no backend. Serve the directory with any static server:

python3 -m http.server 8753 -d .

Then open http://localhost:8753/. It can also be opened directly from disk.

Built on Axe

Styling uses the Axe semantic CSS framework. brand.css is the project's Scouting field-guide palette (navy, warm paper, signal red), with light and dark themes. axe/axe.css and axe/theme.js are vendored copies — refresh them from the Axe repository when it updates.

Structure

index.html    App shell: nav and one <article> per view.
app.js        View rendering, tab routing, and the countdown timers.
content.js    All practice material as data (SOURCES, PATTERNS course, + the four requirement modules).
app.css       Project-specific styles layered on Axe.
brand.css     Project brand: colors, fonts, shape.
axe/          Vendored Axe framework (axe.css, theme.js).
tools/        coverage.py — measures passage decodability and cross-section vocabulary overlap.

License

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). See the LICENSE file. The cognate pairs, sound-shift groupings, and false-friend list are drawn from the mutual-intelligibility project, which is CC BY-SA 4.0; this guide carries the same license accordingly.

Author

David M. Anderson. Built with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic).