Customer Reviews

Deutsch, Na Klar: An Introductory German Course, Third Edition

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

There's really no point to owning this book if you're enrolled in a German class, and there's absolutely no reason for a self-learner to pick this up otherwise. There's a lot of people who say this book "is great if you're in a class / using video / using audio / great teacher / etc etc..." and the truth is, when you have that much enrichment anyway, you don't need a very good book (which is the only time when using this book is acceptable). And the "listening comprehension" CD? It's much more useful as a coaster. A coaster that might cost you a whole paycheck.

Gripes:
-Never provides ANY blocks of words/pronunciations in chapters (even when it does, it tends to have whole phrases translated, not word-by-word breakdowns like you need, especially in the beginning). You have to learn 90% of your words on your own, and then try to figure out what's going on in the book based on your own knowledge. This is an almost absurd problem considering the price.
-Randomly tosses around different dialects of German with little division. Without a professor keeping you informed, you might not even notice some of the differences. My fiancee was dismayed to learn that I wasn't learning the same dialect that she knows (and her dialect is High German, which is the one you're "supposed" to learn in an introductory class). I think I'm learning a more Southern or Austrian dialect. Is that the book's fault or my professor's? Since the book doesn't help, I have absolutely no clue!
-The CD is truly worthless. It barely follows the book, and doesn't provide ANY quick access to any necessary elements. It doesn't have access to very much in the way of pronunciation at all- nearly all of the CD is composed of text application of the words with little or no motivation except as practice for what you should have learned before (except there is no "learning before"- in the book or CD). Inexcusable.
-No answer keys. The book might have you learn new phrases with something like "figure out which of the following phrases are greetings or goodbyes", and unless you ask a professor, you might never know. Again, it's just amazing that a book would cost so much and not contain something like this.
-How can you learn a language when the book never really teaches anything new, and just keeps expecting you to apply knowledge that it doesn't give? It makes no sense!

Counterpoints:
-It's... kind of pretty. If you don't mind that a lot of the pictures aren't properly explained. And those pictures are example exercises in the chapter... yeah, you'll mind.

If you HAVE to have this book for your class, just hope it's a good class. This book seems near-worthless for trying to teach yourself, which as any student knows, is critically important to ANY language class. Listen in class, and don't expect the book to be of much help.

So what do I reccomend?
Even if you class doesn't reccomend it, try to find the two workbooks/lab manuals that go along with the book. Frankly, I've found that they sometimes do a better job of teaching than the book does. AND they have answer keys to help you check your progress. Sadly, however, the manuals don't come with the necessary listening CDs, so you're still going to be left out in the cold for most of the experience. Again, just ridiculous.

Overall:
-If you're taking a German class, and this is the book, you don't have much choice anyway.
-Which is to say, if you're not taking a class and you're learning on your own, virtually any other book does a better job.

Basically, this is one of those books that is fine for classroom teaching, in that it's perfectly fine as long as you have an instructor.

But, there is absolutely no reason why it should cost as much as it does (it's way too expensive here on Amazon, and $200+ at my campus bookstore!). And, there's no reason why the publisher should make minute changes every year and call it a new edition.

Oh, wait. There is one reason - it's a racket just like all of these kinds of books.

We use this book for german 1 and 2 here at duke. Let me start off by saying that I've never been very skilled in learning foreign languages. As such, I have a tendency to lash out at the books that are assigned the job of teaching me in this area ;) This book, I think, gives the reader every possible advantage in terms of learning the language, I think. The grammar is explained clearly, and in a logical order. I'd give it a 5, but as I said, I don't like having to learn foreign languages ;)

Not Terribly User-Friendly

One would think that with 5 revisions, the authors of Na Klar! Would have tried to make it a little bit more user friendly. Since English and German have many cognates, the authors like to encourage a great deal of guessing of meaning in this book. This is perfectly fine, but then I think that there should be a translation or at least a vocabulary bank for advertisements, newspaper articles, ticket stubs, etc. with vocabulary that hasn't been introduced before. A lot of the exercise have this "Hey! English and German are similar, so let's guess our way through this newspaper article with a bunch of words and grammar that you haven't learned yet!" feel to it.
I'm surprised that there is not a whole chapter devoted to just pronunciation. Not all German classes are taught by native German speakers, and I think that this needs to be addressed by a pronunciation of the German alphabet and all words on a CD by native speakers (more on this later).
There needs to be better coordination between the lab book, workbook, and the main text. What I would like to see is a vocabulary bank for each Kapitel that covers all the words from all three books at the end of the chapter in the main book. I think the CD would be more helpful if all of the vocabulary items were pronounced by a native German speaker. Sometimes students may not remember how to pronounce something a few days after class, and having such a resource on CD would be most helpful.
I would actually prefer it if the authors had gone for a text based on the Audio Lingual Method of teaching language, i.e.: "Hans went to the park; Mary went to the department store; Hans went to the park on Tuesday; Mary went to the park on Wednesday; Hans went to the park with Mary on Tuesday; Mary went to the stadium with Hans on Friday; Hans went to the park with Mary on Tuesday to meet some friends; etc." The essence of this method is taking the simplest of structures and then building them up gradually into more and more complex sentences through continual rote listening and repeating. Although this method can be boring for some people, man does it work.
I have both the 4th and 5th editions and the changes are so incredibly minor. The authors and publishers have simply changed the names of people in the examples dialogues and added a couple exercises. I don't think that this merits charging over $100.
I encourage the authors to truly make a superior textbook for the 6th edition. If they do a fabulous job with revision (or even re-write the book from the ground up), then perhaps they can sell it for $80. Until then, my rating for this book is a "2."

UPDATE: After having used this book in class for 2 months, I honestly have to say that the material is just all over the place. The authors really should've tried to aim for some kind of organization, and then after that, they should've gotten it edited by a team of linguists and language teachers. I agree with the other poster that not including an answer key to just plain bizarre. I'd really prefer to drop my rating to 1 star, but Amazon won't let me.

UPDATE 20090902: The amount of new vocabulary thrown out there and not listed in the glossary or at the end of the chapter reaches a fever pitch starting in Kapitel 5. Seriously, schools teaching beginning German shouldn't use this heinous excuse for a textbook.

I have taken two semesters of college German using this book and so far, pretty good! We are in Kapitel 7 right now. I like the pictures and the realia. But I feel it gives enough grammar, too. The explanations are really clear. The accompanying materials are good, too.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is a self-teaching book. It really demands a classroom, and a TV/VCR. Though it is expensive, it is worth it!

I am currently enroled in begining German. This book is not the kind of book you can teach yourself from. You need lots of help along the way - which is fine. But the book does not stand on it's own. Also - the labs were horrible. I think you can do better for the money.

Deutsch Na Klar is an excellent book that covers the course of beginning German. I have used the book in my study of German, and it uses many examples, exercises, charts, appendxes, and one on one conversation practices. It includes cultural information on Germany. It also comes equipped with a full- lenth vocabulary index, whcih allows you to jump back and look up anything you don ont know. This book is highly recommended and complete in itself for German.

For professors considering using this book: Please, please don't.

This is a singularly unhelpful book. It is poorly organized, expensive, and nearly worthless for self-teaching. It does however, have lots of pictures and pretty multi-color printing!

For students in a class using this book: It's a terrible text, but you'll probably have to buy it anyway. And I wouldn't recommend getting a previous edition to save money either - the publisher has made many small, insubstantial changes to the current edition so that the exercises are slightly different and on different page numbers. I tried to use the 4th edition for class, but there were enough differences that I needed the 5th edition to follow along comfortably.

Also, neither this textbook nor the workbook or lab manual when purchased from Amazon included the Quia Book key for the online exercises. If your professor requires them, you'll have to purchase a separate book key from the Quia website.

I had three years of German in high school and signed up for a German class in college where this book was used. The way my course was conducted, we read straight from the book and completed the exercises in it -- that was all. It was a complete waste of time! If you were only to read this book and complete the exercises, you still couldn't communicate well in German. This book encourages a "plug-and-chug" method of learning a language, in which if you follow the given formula, you could ace the homework but you couldn't carry a conversation. Formulaic writing does not teach the mind to think fast enough to speak. I am thoroughly disappointed.

This is a textbook for classroom use as opposed to self study. My two semesters of german at Penn was quite enjoyable; the textbook introduced a lot of grammar points clearly and you build vocabulary through studying themes for each chapter. I can't wait to go to Germany this summer. If your instructor chose this book for you, it is worth the price. The workbook and lab manuals are pretty easy to keep up with, so you won't feel too lost learning a new language.