Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself German Complete Course

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

 

 

Teach Yourself German is a rigorous yet friendly pack which will have you speaking German to Upper-Intermediate level in 2 months.Thus you will be capable of holding conversation with anyone you encounter in Germany, Austria or Switzerland as well as fully follow Germanophone TV, radio and newspapers. As an Irishman, I learned French at school but I find that using Teach Yourself German for 2 full months has me at the same language level in German as 6 years of secondary school French-learning. I can operate fully here in Hannover on the basis which this pack gave me. Moreover, Teach Yourself German is written in such a way that you are receiving full integration into German grammar in a fun and comprehensive way. I fully recommend this pack to anyone intent on learning German.

This book needs serious revisions. It was my first German book and I truly wish I had started off with a different one. Here are my top complaints about it:

1.) ALMOST NO vocabulary... For a beginners language book the authors should never introduce any new words without formally defining them first. This book is full of dialogues, texts, and even exercises where they use words for the first time with no explanation at all. True, there is a "glossary" at the back of the book, but by the authors' own admission it is "not comprehensive". I estimate that I spent 70% of my study time just looking up words and trying to track down their gender, plurals, etc as well as all of the tenses for verbs. (very frustrating)

2.) POORLY ORGANIZED (in my opinion)... When introducing grammatical concepts, I would prefer something like "this is the dative case, it is used in to express these things, this is what it does with nouns and adjectives, and here is a list of all prepositions and verbs that require it". I feel like the book is just a hodge-podge patchwork of concepts not in any particular order.

3.) PREPOSITIONS... in the case of prepositions such as "from" (and many others)where English has one word for it but German has several, the authors should have mentioned that certain German "froms" are only used in coming "from" geographic places where another is only "from" people and another is only "from" one time to another time. If you want a good explanation of ALL prepositions and what each is used for you won't find it here.

4.) MEMORIZE GROUPS OF RELATED WORDS TOGETHER! ... most linguists will tell you that it is easiest to memorize groups of categorically related words together (parts of the house, professions, colors etc) together. There is some of that in the book (some professions, colors, months and weekdays, and body parts) but there needs to be more of it. What about kitchen utensils, locations around town, family members, FOODS, common adjectives describing moods and physical characteristics????? <--to name a few things I would have liked to see

I found this book to be a fairly difficult read. It's poorly laid out, generally, and is written in such a way that the reader becomes more and more bemused as he works his way through each chapter. I'd be amazed if anyone has managed to work their way through the whole of this book...

This course is very good, but it greatly helps to buy the audio edition. I used this course and then the Teach Yourself Further German course to supplement coursework at the University of Virginia. These courses really help with pronunciation and give people taking classes extra assistance.

the worst thing is to buy a new-language "course" that does not teach you how to pronounce. german is very difficult to pronounce and there is no clue whatsoever about pronounciation.the rest is fine i think.the same author has "beginners' german" which contains the pronounciation but with no grammer!!!! the editing of the two books has many gaps.

The price was wonderfully affordable, and the book arrived in better condition than the copy I had been renting from a local library.
This book is very helpful for those trying to learn German, whether you are only trying to learn a bit to visit the country, or are trying to supplement classes.