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Quote from user: Dutch Duckfan Down UnderI'm surprised that all of Don's Donald stories didn't fit in the second book. What's the last story?
"The Lost Charts of Columbus." No "Once and Future Duck," "An Eye for Detail," "WHADALOTTAJARGON," "Sign of the Triple Distelfink," or either of the Caballeros stories. There would've been more or less enough to fill out another volume, if what's happening weren't happening. It's too bad--I would've loved to see the single-part versions of "Once and Future Duck" and the Caballeros stories.

Germany produces a lot of books (Mostly Egmont (Denmark)-produced, but also Disney Italia and Sanoma(Holland) produced. Your heritage is German, and English is a Germanic language. So, German probably makes the most sense. Italian is another possibility, as English uses a lot of Latin-based word roots. If you learn German, you will learn how to spell "Heidelberg" (unless "Heildelberg" is also the name of a German City not too far south of Frankfürt am Main). :)
You might also learn Dutch language, as we at Sanoma produce a lot of good comic books. But, as Dutch is not as populous a language as German or Italian, I'll wager that it will be more difficult for you to find a formal Dutch language course in the Calgary area than German or Italian. German is a very complicated language. So, I suspect that it might be easier for you to master reading in Italian than German, despite German and English being in the same language family.

Quote from user: bergdollhaha! I always spell Heidelberg incorrectly. However, I also spell too many English words incorrectly. :)

I've always thought I should brush-up on German, but Dutch is very interesting to me because A) they do indeed have many great comics and B) I've met a lot of really nice Dutch people, so I would love to travel to the area some day.
You can travel to The Netherlands anyway, with no trouble getting along, because anyone you would come across will be able to speak English very well. Most of the native English speakers I have met in my many years in The Netherlands, gave up trying to learn to speak the language. It has many sounds that English speakers cannot reproduce, or have extreme difficulty getting close (oe), (eu) rounded vowels, sounds made in the very front of the mouth or back of the throat, and the soft and hard gutterals. It will be easier for you to learn to read it than to speak it fluently.

If you've already had some German, I suggest you continue with that. In a few years, after you get very accomplished at German, THEN take on Dutch. Dutch, in many ways is something between German and English (closer to German in many areas of grammar, but closer to English in vocabulary, spelling and some other areas of grammar (both are more simplified than German in number of cases and some other areas).

Frisian (the OTHER national language of The Netherlands, is the "sister language" of Old English (Anglo-Saxon). The Angles (Anglo) were part of the Frisian Tribes, who split off to the north (those left on The Continent are now The North Frisians). Dutch is more or less a sister language (a slight bit farther away(maybe half-sister), while German is more like a cousin to English. Interestingly, in the 1980s, our Dutch Weekly had an educational series on the various provinces of the country, and when they covered Friesland, they featured some Frisian language and how to say certain phrases.

Someone who can read Dutch (and even moreso, Frisian) can understand the gist of Old English. I attempted to read Beowulf in Old English, and could more or less understand the gist of what was going on. Naturally, one would miss the regional idiomatic phrases and much of the humour. That's the problem with trying to read comics in a language that one is not completely fluent in reading. The reader will understand what is happening in the action, but miss many of the clever jokes.

I admire your goal. I have a German friend, who lives in northwestern Germany near the border with The Netherlands. He grew up reading Micky Maus and was a big Disney comics fan and wrote articles about comics. He liked the Dutch comics, and bought them regularly. He learned to read them. About 10 years ago, he ended up getting a job with a Dutch firm in Venlo, just across the border from where he lives. The fact that he learned to read Dutch, with the help of comics, helps him in his job, and made it a LOT easier for him to learn to speak the language.

Comic books have long been used to help immigrants pick up a new language.

Quote from user: Dutch Duckfan Down UnderQuote from user: bergdollI've reached the point where I'm thinking of taking language classes - just so that I can read non-English Duck books! :) I have a dozen or so German digests... what language would make the most sense? Where are the most books being printed?
Dutch is a hard language to learn, and so is French. German is easier, but that's probably only because I'm Dutch. But you're Canadian, do you already know some French?
I would guess that learning German would would be much more difficult for an English speaker than learning French. I have personal experience there. I still struggle with my German, and that's even with the advantage of spending some months there every year for 27 years now, and coming from English AND Dutch. Not only does German have a very complicated grammar, but, its sense (way of thinking is very foreign to an English thinker). True, that the Latin-based languages , including French, have a prevailing word order and sentence structure that is a bit different from that of English. But it is a simple difference, that once learned, becomes instinctual. German has many different situations in which a different part of speech will end up in an order different from that in analogous situation in English.

Quote:Dutch is a hard language to learn, and so is French. German is easier, but that's probably only because I'm Dutch
French harder than German? I'd like to introduce you to my old friend, Shirley U. Jest.

Well...it may well be true for native Dutch speakers, but for me, becoming a more-or-less proficient French reader wasn't that hard (I mean, except inasmuch as learning ANY language is hard), whereas of my brief, abortive efforts at German, the less said the better.

I'd imagine the criteria for which language to learn should be: (1) which language has the most *and* most easily procurable duck stories in print, and (2) which language has the most worthwhile stories written originally in that language (so you'll get the humor in the original script, rather than having to trust the translators to have come up with equally good or better jokes). For #2 I'd guess Italian or Danish or Dutch, with the Dutch writers my personal faves. (You can look up creators on INDUCKS by nationality, to help you answer this question.) There are *lots* of languages that beat German on this score. (Though knowing German will enable you to read the Duckburg Tourist's Guide [Reisefuhrer Entenhausen], which is nothing to sneeze at; it has a *very* cool fold-out map of Duckburg.) For #1, I'm not so sure. Perhaps if the country has an eBay, you can at least get used comics there (I've gotten used comics from eBay.fr and eBay.de). I don't know about the comparative difficulty of getting new comics from any of these countries.

The rest of the comics reading world has started to catch on. Who needs a press release when your Previews write-up can do the talking?
http://blog.newsarama.com/2011/08/05/booms-disney-era-officially-ends-in-october/

The new Previews for November is up, but no surprise there. Except maybe the impressive amount of trade paperbacks from Boom! (I think they're releasing every possible TPB for the classics and Disney Afternoons for probably their final Disney month...) All the remaining Disney regular issues are cancelled.
And Marvel keeps on the Pixar reprints with an "Incredibles" issue.