Customer Reviews

Learn German the Fast and Fun Way with Audio CDs

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a native German speaker who used this for a continuing education course at the local community college. I chose it because it did seem at first to be perfect. However, some things I found were:

The author seems to have rather many Austrian expressions as opposed to standard German. Other than Austrian expressions, there are words I never heard of and would not use in modern German conversation. I noted also that past and future tenses were not addressed. I will not use it for beginners again.

This is a pretty good book, for the price. It has useful language themes (travel situations, practical things) and many good sample dialogs to model your language use on. The layout is visually appealing. Its coverage of grammar is a bit skimpy. Yes, it's very simple, but they may have gone too far. There is no grammar index so it's hard to locate various grammatical explanations. The past verb tenses are not explained in the book, which I think is a deficiency. There are a few typos, too.

I bought this book at a sale without any of the audio CDs, so I am only commenting on the book.

This book is structured around visiting Germany, starting with arrival at the airport, followed by travel, dining, shopping and finishing with departure from the country. Unfortunately, the motivating dialogue at the start of every chapter is unrelated to many of the words introduced in the rest of the chapter. For example, the first chapter has a conversation between an airport clerk and a visitor about lost luggage, then introduces words for family members and furniture but ends without discussing numbers, the casual and polite forms of "you" or even the noun "luggage" in the dialogue.

The book includes is a pull out dictionary in a booklet and pages for flash cards. However, it only has a brief table of contents and does not have an index, so it's pretty hard to find anything later.

Perhaps this book is intended to be used as a workbook with a tutor or with the audio CDs but it doesn't provide any guidance on how it should be used. I didn't find this book useful for self-study and I only use it as a supplement to other German study guides.

Kam-Hung Soh, 2 November 2005.

I teach a conversational German class. I had about an hour to review primers at a major book chain. I picked Learn German by P. Graves out of about 15 other textbooks. It seemed to have a good mix of simple as well as up to date examples of German conversation. The illustrations appear childish at times but they do get the ideas translated very well. The fill in blanks are great with the answers upside down at the bottom of the page. This makes it much more convenient than having the answers at the end of the book that most others use. The feedback from my class so far is very positive.
Ernst Jung

Do NOT buy this book if you are a beginner in German. It starts somewhere in level two or three and goes on from there. The basics are never really explained. It's more of a complete immersion, than a learn from scratch method.

Although, I'm only halfway thru this book I give this book a 3-star just because I've come across books like this. By this I mean books like "Paso A Paso" (which is technically a textbook). Books, that have crudely illustrated pictures (which is not necessarily bad as Everyday Japanese does this but it is good) and start off with the same old my name is chapter, and I'm a tourist in this city. Books like these that throw (too much) verbiage and grammar construction before explaining to the reader, or even explaining it several chapters later (if ever). The key to books like this is you have to be actively paying attention (or rather assume from knowledge you had before hand and make a note to verify your concerns in a proper grammar guide).

That being said, if you've had experience with these type books, then you know this book usually has extreme positives and extreme negatives. The positives I like about this book:

A) The vocab and cultural information used in this book can have some small surprises. Suchas the Germans dont refer to the ground floor as floor number 1. Etc..
B) Some of the chart layouts in the book make it easy to remember conjugations and or declensions.
C) The answers are usually upside-down on the same page. No need to flip all the way to the back.
D) The grammatical terminology is kept to a minimum.
E) The non-standard non-IPA pronunciation guide at the beginning of the book is possibly hands down the best guide I've seen. It coveys rather well to an American speaker, and pretty much covers all aspects of pronounciation accurately enough from what I can tell. That alone might be well enough for one to take a gander at the book.
F) The exercise are pretty decent for a high-beginner like myself.

The cons
A) Vocab is a double-edged sword. A few of the terms apparently do not have as much common usage than what could've been chosen. Apparently.
B) Some of the pictures are annoying. Because they take up unnecessary space, as the pictures arent illustrated well enough that gives them any sort of remembrance. It's nice to break up the reading flow, but sometimes I think wordlists would have been just as good. Another issue is sometimes they will print nearly the same picture with the addition of two or three new words, which is a waste of space.
C) The grammar explanations for this book are kinda wack, late, and in some cases non-existant. Halfway into the book there was no explanation of why the verbs were switching to the end in subordination conjunctions, but they were using them like cake. For example I noticed "wie" which we are told is a question word somehow caused a whole inversion, at that time I was aware of subordinating conjuctions ability to do this since I had been using other resources, though none of those resources at that point mentioned "wie" (or other question words actually) ability to do that. I had to make a note of this and just continue reading under the assumption that all question words could cause this. (and according to German Demystified they can!)

Those are all of the irks I can think at the moment, as I said earlier in this review. I only made it halfway in so far, as I rather learn the language with proper grammar rules and such rather than just learn vocab words and be clueless on how to decipher a sentence. So I switched to German DeMYSTiFieD, Second Edition by Ed Swick and have been reading that. That is a very good book. It teaches not only grammar, but it teaches it in a simple non overly-linguistical manner similar to how this book is, but I'd say more comprehensive. Not only that Ed Swick's book is for beginners as well and is much more logical. Though, it doesnt have none of the pictures (if your into that) and I'd say Learn German The Easy Way's "Everyday items" vocabulary is a more complete than Swick's German DeMystified book, although in the case of grammar DeMystified is more complete than Learn German The Easy Way.

Either way, I personally prefer Swick's book moreso for the grammar but this book isnt too bad if you are a little learned and plan to actively note-take. Though, this book is definitely a supplementary and I will definitely come back to this book for reinforcement, review, and additional vocabulary/cultural insights much later.

in a community college course I took. The edition we used for the course had no CDs. I remained for two quarters, each taught by a different instructor. The first completely ignored the book. The second used the book but supplemented with other material.

This book is definitely not for the serious student of German.

It is also of no value for a review of German, or for a reference book.

It is oriented to people who want to learn vocabulary and phrases oriented to travel, something most books tend to omit. It is probably fine if you just want to pick up some basic phrases for a vacation to Germany.

So I buy this book for fun because I just wanted to see how a American peaople learn German(I am really a german)
and I have to say it is not bad but I dont't understand sometimes the grammar from german and this book is good for someone who
will just learn easily german. For everybody who will learn (very)good german is this book just the start.

Learn German the Fast and Fun Way (Fast and Fun Way Series)

Before buying for myself and for a friend...I carefully read and considered the previous Amazon buyer reviews. After receiving and using this language learning product, I feel that I "got what I bought" !!

First, learning (or in my case, RE-learning) German using this book is just as advertised...."Fast" and "Fun" !! The grouping of words and phrases by "where and how" they would be used, and the use of simple pictorial prompters makes use of the book very easy, interesting, and lierally "fun"...a very welcome change from the all-too-usual dull and ponderous language books.

The caveats that I saw in the previous reviews, and accepted in order to get the "fast and fun" format of this book, are there...and are not bothersome to me.

Yes, the English translations of the German words and phrases are literal only for the yellow highlighted instances, and otherwise require some basic knowledge of German if one is to relate directly word-for-word as in the case of one trying to learn grammar as well as vocabulary. Yes, verb tenses other than present do not seem to be well-included here. Yes, there are some phrases which may be Austrian or Swiss vernacular; they might as well be German regional vernacular also, but knowledge of these is useful too as one may travel in these regions, and I think they will be understood whereever used in German-speaking areas.

These caveats notwithstanding...I have found this product to be extremely USEFUL for my present needs as well as "Fast and Fun" as advertised. Its usefulness is not diminished by my supplementing it with a good German-English dictionary, nor by my plan to add a simple grammar book as well.

I have really enjoyed working through this book. It does focus a lot on the vocab you'll need if you are travelling to Germany. If you are looking for basic grammar, this tries to explain it, but may not be what you are looking for. The CDs help a lot, but you really need the book in front of you if you are listening to them, because they don't give the translation on the CDs. This forces you to follow along through the book. The phonetic spellings in the book are also very good to help improve your accent.