Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet German Phrasebook (Lonely Planet Phrasebook: India) (German Edition)

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This is one of the hippest, most up-to-date German phrasebooks on the market...which is unfortunate, because it also contains more errors than any other book written by Germans about the German language that I've ever seen (and I've seen plenty). Typos (p.47: 'reffen' for 'treffen'), mismatched paradigms (p.41: 'to have' used for 'to be'), mismatched phrases (p.68: 'with child/pensioner' confused with 'concession'), factual errors (p.50: 'ab' called a preposition; p.51:'anstatt' and 'trotz' listed as acc./dat. prepositions), uncorrected computer glitches (p.36-38: 'ibt' and 'ebt' for 'isst' and 'esst'; 'wei' for 'weiss') and organizational gaffes (a footnote on p.62 referring you to p.62) are just a few examples. There are also misleading definitions due to the differences between British and American English: A 'chemist' is defined as a 'Drogist', which is fine if he works in a British drugstore, but a chemical scientist is a 'Chemiker/in'.

I caught about 46 such errors. On the other hand, the book is more fun to read than the typical phrasebook and has all the useful cultural info and quirky personal insights that mark the Lonely Planet series. Still, when there are so many minor flaws, you've got to wonder about the whole product.

Bottom line: I'd recommend it only if you can have a qualified German teacher proofread it for you before you use it.

After I had bought this book and set about seriously reading it, I discovered too many errors. At first I thought I had not remembered my high school German, but after checking dictionaries I realized this guide book was very flawed with incorrect translations. It reminded me of the Monty Python sketch with the Hungarian tourist and his Hungarian-English phrasebook: "Oh my nipples explode...." When I went on my European vacation I didn't take this guide along.

If you learned German in high school or college and know the vocab and grammar but don't know how to find a cigarette or a club (without sounding stupid), go ahead and buy this book. It will provide phrases that you never learned in high school but will be invaluable while you're traveling around German-speaking countries, especially if you're young and hip. If you don't already know German, buy something with fewer typos. There must be a typo on every 4th or 5th page in this book. (Although I haven't actually counted.)

Two notable phrases from this book:
"Where can I find lesbian club?"
"I'm still a groupie after all these years."

The study of the German language is a personal hobby of mine, though I have never received any formal education on the subject. For any casual speaker of Deutsch, like myself, this phrasebook should prove to be invaluable. While it does contain numerous errors, the sheer volume of material covered easily offsets the book's grammatical oversights. For the price, it provides what I consider to be an impressive level of immersion, especially for those of us who have never had the chance to visit Germany or Austria.

It helped me a lot while I was traveling in Germany and learning the language.