Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Beginner's Dutch Audiopackage

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4 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

Gerdi Quist's and Lesley Gilbert's book is an introductory course to a foreign language for someone who doesn't want to spend a lot of money on foreign language classes, has little experience working with foreign languages, has, indeed, little knowledge of their English grammar, and basically wants to get a good working knowledge of Dutch. All the most important grammatical rules are touched upon; however, it could use some more excercises, in my opinion. I would not recommend this book for the scholar or someone who wants to learn Dutch throughly and also quickly, but for the accidental tourist it's adequate. (Though for the latter I would recommend finding a tourist phrase book to go along with Quist's and Gilbert's book, for the sake of a little more thorough treatment of useful phrases.)

The book is decent for the American, but I get the impression that it is designed for the Jolly John Bull. The authors have included a lot of cultural notes interspersed with the basic grammar, along with some comments on such diverse, unlinguistic things as banking, housing, and employment. The phrasing is definitely British, and, Yankee that I am, it's a little annoying. The Dutch speakers on the cassette tapes (also available) are ridiculous to an extent, but maybe it's just the natural sound of the language as I know it to be, a little embellished. I've heard English speakers do the same on English-language tapes.

But for those who don't mind the Anglo-isms, Quist's and Gilbert's book presents the basics of Dutch grammar in a comprehensive manner with a good emphasis on practicality. For its price, (half the cost at Amazon what I paid for it at a bookstore) I certainly consider it well worth expense.

This book and two cassettes contain a lot of useful information, however it is paced EXTREMELY fast and contains little translation of the Dutch conversations it presents. It is impossible to listen to the tapes while driving and make any sense of it. You must read the book carefully and listen to the tapes a bit at a time...AT HOME!

Learning a new language is almost impossible without hearing the pronounciation of the words. The book is good however without the audio material the quality is strongly reduced; especially since it is said to be for "beginners". The book itself indicate that there is a cassette which accompany's it, however this is not the case. I have had it shipped to me twice without receiving the cassette. With the appropriate cd or cassette I would give this book at least 3 stars because it has basic everyday words and sentences.

I like the step by step approach. Because of this, I also bought "Teach yourself French"

I have been working with this book for a month now and have found it to be an excellent book for the begining student. I can only guess that the older 1-star reviews were working from a different book. I agree with the comments that the CD's are required. While Dutch pronunciation is regular (that is, spelling and sounds correspond fairly well), getting the exact prounciation and intonation is hard without hearing native speakers. The speakers on the CD's are slower than normal conversation speed, whihc is nice for the beginner. They could speed up a bit in later chapters, and do in the few exercises that portray more colloquial langauge.

As it is a beginners book, it doesn't bog one down in minutiae, but this can also be a bit frustrating. In the part about going to the market, only a few food terms are given - no copete list is provided. But as Ducth pronunciation is regular, you could get a phrase book, whihc often give long lists, to supplement this book.

This book teaches basic grammar, enough to get started. It gives the present and future tenses, but only a few examples of the past, and no explanations of past tense formation (just scattered vocab items when required by the context of a dialog). I personally wasn't looking to learn Ducth intensively, but I'm guessing, if you want a more complete package, the regular Teach Yourself Dutch (not beginner's) would be more to your liking. They also publish a Teach Yourself Dutch Grammar.

For someone relatively experienced at learning new languages, 'Beginner's Dutch' is both very helpful and slightly frustrating.

On the one hand, the book is lucid and its explanations concise and free of jargon. Further, I found the writing style of the authors to be fluid and engaging.

On the other hand, the authors tend to spoon feed the mechanics of Dutch grammar to the reader (admittedly, less a problem for some than others). Also, the book's small dictionary leaves a lot to be desired.

In sum, Beginner's Dutch seems to be a very useful learning tool, but remember to buy a dictionary to supplement your studies (and finding a decent, reasonably-priced Dutch-English dictionary is an entirely different matter).

-CS

This tapeless book is almost useless. Although it does cover many topics, there were too many mistakes in the first couple chapters for me to trust the rest of it.
Order this book only if you have a native speaker willing to go through it with you.