Customer Reviews

Easy Ways to Enlarge Your German Vocabulary (Dover Dual Language German)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Cons:

1) Definitely not for beginners, it presuposes a more than basic understanding of German grammar and vocabulary.
2) Extremely brief explantions before the execises. If you are a beginner, you'd better look for a frendlier book; if you are intermediate, they can only serve as a reminder of what you already know.
3) Rustic, typewriter style. Accents and umlaugs are handwritten, letters have varying darkness and thickness, no images or visual aids whatsoever.
4) Keys at the end of the book are compressed, apparently to save space, making it more laborious to verify some of them.

Pros:

1) Plenty of exercises.

I'd only recommend it to german speakers who stopped practicing for a long period of time and now want to recover vocabulary by doing plenty of written exercises.

This is a very useful book for anyone learning German, since it, as promised, gives easy ways to expand your vocabulary, at the same time giving useful insights into how the language works. It explains rules for German wordbuilding, shows how Grimm's Law of sound shifts affects cognate words, and does an excellent job of assisting in the learning of large groups of related words. Definitely a must-have book.

This book is really great. It teaches German students how to increase their vocabulary by learning the German suffixes and prefixes to add to the existing vocabulary that the student is already familiar with. By learning what each suffix and prefix means, the student need only concern him/herself with the main root of the word. From there the student can invent legitimate German words based on the knowledge gained from this book. In German, it is often very easy to create new words based on the words already known to the speaker & with the help of this book, it becomes a little bit easier. The various suffixes and prefixes are defined & explained and the author describes how each suffix and how each prefix changes the meaning of a root word. I love this book!!

This book is a great help in building my German vocabulary. By following this book and studing hard, over a period of time we aquired many new German words, their meanings, and how to use them.
Covers the relationship between English and German words. And explains with examples, compound words, word origins, roots, adding sufixes and prefixes to make new words and more. Includes easy 84 practice lessons, with answers.
This book is a great help. But, it designed to be used with other tutorial books, software, or classroom instruction.

I think this is one of the best books on German vocabulary I have seen. It's a bit academic, but it more than compensates for that by taking an approach to vocabulary that is largely ignored, that is, by explaining how all those column-width words are formed. By seeing how words are formed, one gets a better idea of the literal sense of the word, and I found that helps me understand better the derivation of English words from German.

Every serious student of German should own this book and work the exercises from cover to cover!

Language is a large and intricate puzzle. Any help to find the patterns and consistencies can be enormously useful. I am new to German, but have studied and learned other Germanic languages, English, of course, but also Danish and Norwegian. In this great puzzle, finding little things similar to one's own language is a great confidence builder and base for more learning. After just a few minutes with this book you will have dozens more German words. It is like finding the edge pieces in a difficult picture puzzle. And the patterns allow greater vocabulary very quickly. The pronunciation of German is very different (difficult), and this is where the illusion of how different English is from German came from. After working with this book, you will see how similar the two languages really are (grammar aside). As a side benefit, you will realize a greater appreciation and understanding of English.

I did not give the book 5 stars, because I believe simple layout improvements could make it so much more useful. I don't care about the obvious typewriter font and hand written umlauts (it is 30 years old after all). What I mean is, adding a little clarity to the exercises and how to use them more effectively would help a lot. You really feel on your own here. But please do not hesitate to buy this book because of these minor faults. One day with it is worth the price. And you will add hundreds of words to your vocabulary with a minimum of effort. Well done.

I highly recommend this book. It is a wonderful tool for a speaker of English to really expand your vocabulary in German. It helps you learn to start figuring out words for yourself and you realize you know more than you think you know. It helps you get past "the hump" (frustration) of learning a new language when you don't know enough to even try. Even if your grammar is awful, if you have a decent vocabulary, I have noticed that people will try very hard to figure out what you mean and work with you. Thus, communication in German begins. Once you start communicating, it makes learning a new language more enjoyable and fewer "drills" are needed to learn the same material. This really truly is an easy and interesting way to expand your German vocabulary. German teachers should really consider making this book one of the required texts because it helped me tremendously in a very short period of time and it compliments any system or text being used to teach. Buy this book.

When I received this book, or booklet, I was somewhat disappointed. The typeface and layout look like a highschool handout from 1965. But the content and organization are excellent. Mysteries of German (some of them anyway) are explained for the first time. Also ways of organizing German vocabulary into thoughtful and somewhat predictible groups are included. So, once you get over the initial shock of the format, this book provides a lot of valuable content.

I must put this book down as a very poor investment for myself. When you first open the book you are immediatly struck by how primitive the typesetting is. It looks as if someone with a typewriter wrote this book. The umlauts are even off-center for most letters. While this in itself wouldn't condemn a book, you know what they say about first impressions.

But then you start reading. I should explain that I am an adult, studying German on my own. So what I look for in a German work book is something that engages me and that I look forward to picking it up over my lunch. This book did neither. There is so much of, "the student..." that you quickly get the impression they just took a teacher's workbook and slapped this cover on it. After it sat unused on my desk for two weeks I just gave up with it and purchased a different book.

I did get about half way through, but I gave up on the exercises before then. Here's why. The author will introduce word parts (prefixes, suffixes, etc) then ask you to match the German with the English. Sounds like a good idea, but one cannot just split a word apart to derive the meaing. For example, practice 32, you need to know 'Einkommen' matches up with 'income'. Nothing in the text helps you with that so if you didn't already know it, you would only be guessing. But then, what's the point?

The author does a nice job of progressing through the various ways German builds compound words, but it is so user-unfriendly, I put it back on the shelf.

This is a very valuable book for a serious student of German who already possesses some linguistic knowledge (advanced beginner, definitely intermediate or more advanced). For a book published in 1974, it still retains its high value. I found many topics covered in a great detail with many examples provided that were followed by a small set of exercises ( the key to all exercises is also included). The most interesting to me are 1. the tables showing consonant relationships between German and English (they allow a keen student to derive the meanings of many German words from related English words), 2. the treatment of cognates (and also the so-called Faux Amis, known as - "False Friends") is quite good (could be better though), 3. the treatment of compounds (nouns, adjectives and verbs) is very good and helpful as well as methods of recognition of German words that originated in other languages, 4. the most valuable part for me was the treatment of word formation through the use of prefix/suffix combinations captured tersely in a tabular format.