Customer Reviews

Teach Me Everyday German (Teach Me... (Teach Me Tapes))

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I am tutoring two girls in German, ages 4 and 7, and I am a native speaker. I had hoped to use the CD with the songs for the younger girl especially, as she can't read yet. So I was disappointed at the quality of the CD. The spoken parts, which are the text of the book, are well done by native German children. The songs are sung by an American children's choir and the pronounciation often has quite an accent. Also, the sound mix between voices and instruments is not very good, often the instruments are too loud. But my main disappointment is that popular English songs were used (most of them don't exist in German) and German lyrics written as a translation of the original English text. The songs include "Head and shoulders, knees and toes", "Rain, rain, go away", "Oh! Susanna", "Twinkle, twinkle", among some others. Then the songs are done very fast so that it is really hard to keep up if you are just learning new lyrics in a different language. As they play each song with the English lyrics also, it is easy to just get frustrated, tune out the German, and wait for the familiar English. The publisher wasted a big opportunity with the music on the Cd, I find the songs quite useless.
The book itself is well done for an introduction to German for elementary age children, and has appealing illustrations. I also like that the content is presented as if a German girl and boy tell you about their lives. There are 2-3 sentences per page, big and bold in German with an English translation in small print lower on the page. As the book has only 32 pages it doesn't take long to go through it. I wished they had put more content/pages in it.