Customer Reviews

German for Dummies

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book fails on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. For starters, the alphabet is never formally introduced with German letter equivalents, scotching the possibility that you'll ever have to spell something over the phone. The book then attempts to vomit up all the German grammar you'll ever need, even though at this point the reader barely knows any words, let alone whole sentences. For the reader who knows no German, the sample sentences in the chapters that follow contain far too many words which are never defined. Apparently the authors believe that the beginner is better served by parroting back whole sentences instead of actually learning vocabulary. The "mini-dictionary" in the back of the book is some editor's idea of a bad joke, and contains almost none of the words I've ever looked up from the book's own sample sentences. The CD, while useful, only demonstrates selected dialogues from the book, and ignores many key phrases that might be more practical.

To put things in perspective, I consider this book even more unreadable than the 2nd edition of O'Reilly's Programming Perl.

If you're a beginner at learning german,like me, you will find this book totally useless. You never even really learn the alphabet,let alone phrases. The cd is of little help because it starts right off with phrases before you can even learn the vocabulary! It tries to teach you the vocabulary, but how do you pronouce it when the book provides little help? It left me feeling frustrated, scratching my head, and trying, without prevail, to figure out what it meant.

I have been trying to learn German for a long time. I am planning on going to live in Germany next year as an exachange student, since my school does not have a German program I thought it would be smart to get basic German down. This book is not about the basics! It just tells you the phrase, doesn't tell you how exactly it translates, just tells you an extremely rough definition. It doesn't explain grammar, it isn't 'quick and easy', it doesn't help build your vocabulary at all, and if it does, it has a table of words, and just says "memorize...". It never uses the words that you learn again. Worst of all its not consistent at all, and it's horrible at comprehending anything the author is trying to get across to you. My good friend from Germany looked at this book, and told me that it was "schiesse". Overall German for Dummies, is a very poor source of information for German.

I`ve taken german class at my highschool for 2 years, but could not finish due to schedual difficulties. I bought this book to continue learning on my own and I must say, This is the best investment I have ever made on my road to learning german. Be wary though, I do not recommend this book for people who have no background in german, this book fails to explain basic fundamentals that are nessessary for a german student to learn. Overlooking this fact, this book's information is usefull and explains everything in a simple to understand format. It comes with an audio CD with most of the conversations from the book. I like this feature because it helps me to understand the tone and pronounciation of native german speakers. Another area where this book fails is it's dictionary. I recomend you purchase a english/german german/english dictionary for use with this book. But overall, I HIGHLY recommend this book for anyone who is seriously intrested in learning German.

I am taking a German class at the Goethe Institute and was a little disappointed by the materials, which seem rather unorganized. This book is well organized, lays it out clearly and is a useful guide. I have read the other reviews, which are pretty negative, and, quite frankly, I just don't get it. This is a good book.

I have generally found language books of this nature to be disappointing but before heading to Vienna, I took a gamble that this book/text may be better. I was once again left unimpressed. Although I can see its potential, the book tries to be too many things all at once and it would be nigh impossible to gain any real benefit, let alone language ability, out of it. Although I have not studied German since, I recently spotted "Ultimate Living German" which looked very good so I may try it once again.

Even if you want to study only a little German before embarking on a holiday, I am sure there must be better books than German for Dummies. It will only make you confused, frustrated and out of pocket. For those who want to study German seriously, then this is definitely not for you (even for the beginner).

Viel Glueck!

but it is OK to check out of the library. It's fun, but superficial. It is certainly not for the serious student of German.

On the plus side, it's light hearted. It explains grammatical terms you need, such as 'verb', 'adjective', 'indirect object', rather than assuming you already understand what these terms mean. It has cultural notes which make a good read. (Not being German, I can't say whether they are truthful or not.) It has an audio CD which I listened to many times as I drove 600+ miles over the holiday. The pace of the audio CD is quite good; the dialogues are repeated as natives would speak, then again in small chunks which nearly always are slow enough and small enough to remember long enough to repeat.

I won't recount the flaws mentioned in earlier reviews. These are accurate, but I will add a few observations of my own.

The English text and English portion of the audio CD have glaring errors. For example, 'seperate' appears in the text, and 'imitate as close (sic) as you can' is said on the CD. These blatant and easily corrected errors (I mean come on; doesn't Berlitz use a spell checker? Don't they emply native English speakers on staff? Have they outsourced the English portions to India?) in the English text erode my confidence in the accuracy of the German presented.

I'm skeptical of the claim that parts of the CD are repeated as natives would. Compared to the German speakers on [...], the actors on the CD speak much more slowly. For beginners this is certainly a good thing, but I suspect we Americans are in for a shock when we hear true native dialogue.

The vocal actors pronounce the same words differently. Are they meant to represent different regional accents, or are these idiosyncracies of the actors? This is not explained at all.

To my American ears, some of the actors on the audio CD sound -- well, rude! One actor says 'vielen dank' (many thanks) in a tone most Americans would interpret as dripping with sarcasm! Is it meant to be rude? Is that just the way German is? Is it a European thing? Is it bad vocal acting? This could be important culturally, but is not discussed.

My advice to those considering this book for a grammar reference, as suggested in earlier reviews, is to get a good German-English/English-German dictionary. The better ones contain a grammar appendix with the same information, and you get a good dictionary also!

This book does a decent job at teaching you some basic vocabulary, though it does have a lot of list of random words that would take a while to memorize for their usefulness. Its got pretty good grammar explanations and charts for how to modify the endings and how to change pronouns depending on what case they take. You learn some conversational german, but not a ton. Now i just use this as a refference book for looking up how to change der, die, and das (the) according to the case of the word and other stuff like that. Its not really great though for use other than that

In the past I purchased the German Demystified and I was able to follow along and I found it to be a very nice studie guide. after a few years I misplaced the book and went out to find another. With that in mind I figured most of these kinds of books are the same and so I purchased German for Dummies and I am completely unhappy with it. It's just not very clear to me and there is to much extra nonsense thrown in the material. I was reading up on the reflexive nouns and the examples I thought were just poor. These examples simply left me with more questions then I had before reading the chapter. They needed to include more examples and they shoul dhave been easier to understand! So, here I am paying for yet another book (German Demystified) because this book just doesn't do it for me.

this is a good book but you're not going to get a lot of foundation - cute exercises but not a lot of meat