Problem with unwanted endless loop while reading a file

Question

Hi everyone,
i got stuck with a class, that reads all words out of an input file, counts each file's frequency and prints out a list with words and frequency.
Everything works fine as long as i use a In.read() method included in a example class provided by the book i use to learn java. But this method will not be allowed to use in the exam, even if the whole lecture at uni based on it. Well, not that much a problem, if i would be able to replace it by a FileReader or something like this.
Problem: The test file (input.txt) contains a phrase like "This is a test text to count the words included in the test text". Shoul return all unique words and their frequency. As my pc crashed everytime i started the class, i found out that my failure has to come from the readWord method. It reads the first word in an endless loop (which seems to be the reason for the crashs) and is not willing to continue reading the next word after it returned the first to the main method. Instead it resets and starts from the beginning. I stripped of any additional processing methods and included a "system.out.println()" in order to narrow down the failure.
I really don't understand this, because read() reads character after character and it is added to the buffer as planed and i don't see any reason why it resets to 0. I can use the same code (apart from the file reader and exception handling stuff and the "!= -1" check) with the In.java-class and it works.
Here comes the code. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Greg
import java.io.*;
public class WordCount {
      * @param args
     public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
          //reads first word out of the input file
          String w = readWord();
          while(w != null){
               //test output to verify anything is read
               System.out.println(w);
               //next word to read
               w = readWord();
          //close input stream
          System.in.close();
     static String readWord() throws IOException{
          FileReader eingabestrom = new FileReader("input.txt");
          StringBuffer word = new StringBuffer();
          int gelesen;
          /*read first character
           * -1 if no text in the input file. In this case,
           * both while loops are skipped and "null" is returned
          do gelesen = eingabestrom.read();
          //skip blanks
          while(gelesen != -1 && !Character.isLetter( (char) gelesen));
          //read all characters of a word and append it to the "word" stringbuffer
          while(gelesen != -1 && Character.isLetter( (char) gelesen)){
               word.append( (char) gelesen);
               gelesen = eingabestrom.read();
          //if read was successful, convert buffer to string and return it to main.
          if(word.length() > 0){
               return word.toString();
          //if read was unsuccessful, return null
          }else{
               return null;
}

Answer 1

Thank you! :)
Works perfectly, i do understand most of it and i discovered the little mistake that prevented it from starting ;)
Set<Map.Entry><String,Integer>> set = tm.entrySet();Needs less than half the code i used before :)
Thx again
Greg