Customer Reviews

Just Look 'n Learn German Picture Dictionary

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My niece wants to learn German so I thought I would buy her this book. I speak fluent German and I thought it would be helpful, and a cute way to learn. This is a cute book with cute pictures. It is not helpful for learning German, however. There does not seem to be a pronunciation guide.
Each page has about 15 words alphabetically with the word in English, the word in German, a sentence in German, the picture, and the sentence in English. If you didn't know German already, you could not learn it from this book because you wouldn't be able to read the sentence (or the word, for that matter), nor would your pronunciation be good. BTW it is alphabetized in English. It has a couple of pages with the numbers (1,2,3...) written out in German, the days of the week, etc. But it's just not helpful. Plus, I think that for anyone old enough to read English OR German by themselves, the pictures are too babyish.

Although I agree with the other reviewer that this book may not be very useful for someone who knows no German, my experience was different. I am 42 years old and decided to teach myself German several months ago. I checked out books/cds from the library, visited many websites, etc. to learn everything I could. I came across this book while I was working in a middle school library and liked it so much that I bought one myself. Because I had learned many nouns and lots of basic verbs (and pronunciation), this little book filled in some gaps along the way for me. It helped me understand a little more about sentence structure (although the sentences are all present tense) and how certain words are used (often not at all the way we would use them in English). There are LOADS of very common words and I've learned a lot. Could you hand it to a child and expect her to learn German from it? NO WAY. Can it be used to help someone who is already learning German? DEFINITELY.