Customer Reviews

Practical Review of German Grammar, A (3rd Edition)

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

 

 

For an intermediate German student who needs to revise grammar, this is an easy to follow book with concise explanations and good exercises. Also, each chapter includes new words and, especially helpful, idioms which one would not find in a dictionary. This is not for a beginner, nor for someone fluent in German.

The reviews printed here (other than this one) appear to refer to the 2nd not 3rd edition. Whenever a "second author" pops up on an edition of a successful one-author book, it almost invariably indicates the book had to be "more user friendly" or "more accessible" and other triple speak phrases. At least in this case the page count went down instead of doubling and the price decreased instead of doubling to tripling (as in calculus books for example). It reflects the drive to make SAT tests easier to bring up the scores, pass every one to avoid complaints and put in more and prettier graphics to "attract" the student. The third editon has less depth and fewer real exercises. Shade! It remains however a highly useful book; although my own feeling is that it ranks below a MUCH cheaper Schaums Outline, "German Grammer"

The reviews printed here (other than this one) appear to refer to the 2nd not 3rd edition. Whenever a "second author" pops up on an edition of a successful one-author book, it almost invariably indicates the book had to be "more user friendly" or "more accessible" and other triple speak phrases. At least in this case the page count went down instead of doubling and the price decreased instead of doubling to tripling (as in calculus books for example). It reflects the drive to make SAT tests easier to bring up the scores, pass every one to avoid complaints and put in more and prettier graphics to "attract" the student. The third editon has less depth and fewer real exercises. Shade! It remains however a highly useful book; although my own feeling is that it ranks below a MUCH cheaper Schaums Outline, "German Grammer"

I was a total biginner of German, who didn't even know what 'Guten Tag' meant. But I learned German grammer by myself with this book literally in two months, and after a year of German self-teaching, I got an internship offer in Germany (of course conducted in German). Now I have no problem conversing with German people. I strongly recommend this book.

Two years ago, as a freshman at Central College (Pella, IA), we used this book (edited by our professor). We felt the book was very well written, well divided, and very helpful. However, we paid less that the list price shown.

Although this is a decent intermediate German Grammar book, and in fact one of the best currently available, the penultimate edition was vastly superior, in my opinion. There were more and better exercises, and I felt that the coverage of every point was really thorough--to the point of being German. This version seems by contrast a bit dilute. Nonetheless, I am sure that the lighter weight of this edition will be appreciated by those who have too much stuff to schlepp around in their backpacks.

It is a good, well written textbook that helps explain important concepts in good detail. The written exercises enhance the learning experience and the book is neatly ordered into different concepts, such as different verb tenses, nouns, adjectives, subjunctive, etc.

Book is just OK. There are a lot of exercises but without the correct answer you can't tell if you are doing them correctly.
Also, I don't care for the order the material is presented.
If used in a class or with other materials, should be fine.

As an upper intermediate speaker of German, this book pushed me to being advanced. My grammar is almost perfect after applying the elements of this book. I encourage anybody who is wanting to work on grammar and general fluency to use this book.

I can't say that I have seen the second edition, but I will put that on my to-do list.

I wish I could find such a good book for French grammar...

its great, but its "hoch deutsche" so if you want to learn german that is more commonly used, i would recommend just moving to germany.