One 90-minute cassette and a listening guide in both English and the target language.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"I did very well on my Defense Language Proficiency Test due in large part to your ImmersionPlus tapes."
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Let's Talk German Today,
By Nicholas Duran (Cleveland,, OH USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Let's Talk German Today with Book (Let's Talk Today) (Audio Cassette)
An excellent concept, inadquately realized. The method of speaking first at a normal pace--often difficult to understand on first hearing--and then more slowly and carefully enunciated, is of great value, and justifies the reasonable price. However the tapes have a serious shortcoming in the area of vocabulary building, which is, of course, fundamental to learning a language. The problem, the serious problem, with these tapes is the colloquial English translations. These translations, while essentially accurate, frequently give the student little or no idea of the specific meaning of the German phrase, of the individual German words. English words are used as translations which, if then looked up in the dictionary, give words in German different from the original German word. Also, instead of using an English cognate, which would aid the student in fixing the meaning of the German word, in a translation that, at worst, would be slightly awkward, a colloquial English translation is used that, although it accurately expresses the meaning of the sentence, uses words that do not accurately express the meaning of the words used to make up the sentence. Vocabulary building is sacrificed for English style, where style is at best, of secondary importance. For instance:"Wahrend wir uns das uberlegen, giesse ich mir einen Drink ein un schaue mir die Sportnachrichtin im Fernsehen an." "Uberlagen" is translated as, "thinking about it", and "giesse" as "make". However "uberlegen" is more generally translated "considering", and "giesse" as "pour"--both perfectly reasonable translations in this context. And going the other way, "thinking" is of course more usually translated "denken", and "make" as "machen". "Considering" and "pour" are two useful words, but one would not learn them from this dialogue. And then: "Kann ich Dir auch einen Drink mixen?" which could be quite adequately translated: "Can I also mix you a drink?" but which is translated: "Can I fix you one?" The English translations are all chatty exchanges that might well be used as movie subtitles that have as an objective the transmission of general meaning. Unfortunately they are of limited, and in fact in many cases, of negative use for learning vocabulary. What is needed here are obviously not word-for-word literal translations such as, "Can I you also a drink mix?", but rather translations that stick as close as possible to the German words used, where possible to the German word order (although German makes that difficult), make maximum use of cognates, and that do not combine or separate sentences to satisfy English diction, even at the expense of some awkwardness of expression. The closer to a literal translation, without sacrificing coherence, the better. The objective is not to learn how to translate fluently into English, but rather to understand and speak acceptable German.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent way to improve listening comprehension,
By A Customer
This review is from: Let's Talk German Today with Book (Let's Talk Today) (Audio Cassette)
For someone at an intermediate to advanced level, this is the best method for maintaining or improving listening comprehension that I have yet found. The format has been described in previous reviews so I won't repeat that here. I have both the German and French versions of the tape so I can comment on them from the prospective of someone with widely differing language abilities. Since I spent two years in Germany and studied German at the university level, I could understand the German tape the first time I listened to it. It is an excellent example of normal conversation - something all too often lacking from your typical language course, which seems to either present tourist phrases or delves into classical literature. This is normal spoken German such as you might hear regular folks speaking in Germany today. There were few words that were not familiar to me and those that were are probably regional variations or colloquialisms not common in central Germany where I lived. As a previous reviewer pointed out, the tape is not primarily intended as a means of vocabulary acquisition and the English translations are quite free. Better to simply look up the German word directly if you are unfamiliar with it. For comparison, the French version (which contains the exact same stories) was much more difficult for me. I have studied only a couple of semesters of college French and have never lived in a French speaking country so, as others have pointed out, I have had to listen to the tape many times to even begin to gain a good comprehension of the spoken French. It certainly helps that I already know the stories from the German version. Too often language courses present individual sentences for listening comprehension. This gives you time to listen carefully and then think about what has been said. In real life (and in this tape) the conversation doesn't stop for you to think about what was said and you can quickly find yourself lost. You could listen to a radio broadcast or movie but then you would have no transcription to let you review what you heard and it can't be slowed down to help you catch what you're missing. This tape allows you to do just that and I highly recommend it. (Interestingly, with the advent of DVDs, I've noticed that you can pick the spoken language and subtitles independently allowing you, for instance, to choose to view a film in French along with the French subtitles. Unfortunately most movies seem to come in English, Spanish, and French so it doesn't help my German. I haven't tried it in French yet to see if the subtitles are an actual transcript of the spoken language but that would be another effective method for improving listen comprehension.)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Keep up your German skills,
By
This review is from: Let's Talk German Today with Book (Let's Talk Today) (Audio Cassette)
For those of us living in a non German-speaking environment it is vital to keep up our knowledge of the language somehow, and I find audio cassettes an excellent medium.This 90 minute tape features four dialogues, each split into three or four parts. Each part is spoken once at normal speed, then again very slowly, so that one can catch all the words clearly, and finally again at normal speed. This is an effective method as it promotes comprehension and reinforces by repetition. A booklet with the full text of the dialogues accompanies the cassette. My main regret is that there is only one tape.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
