Product Description

Bestselling language courses now with audio CDs!

From Danish to Spanish, Swahili to Brazilian Portuguese, the languages of the world are brought within the reach of any beginning student. Learners can use the Teach Yourself Language Courses at their own pace or as a supplement to formal courses. These complete courses are based on the very latest learning methods and designed to be enjoyable and user-friendly.

Prepared by experts in the language, each course begins with the basics and gradually promotes the student to a level of smooth and confident communication, including:

• Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues
• Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises
• Step-by-step guide to pronunciation
• Practical vocabulary
• Regular and irregular verb tables
• Plenty of practice exercises and answers
• Bilingual glossary

The new editions also feature:

• Clear, uncluttered, and user-friendly layout
• Self-assessment quizzes to test progress
• Website suggestions to take language study further

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #376334 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Paperback

About the Author

Paul Coggle

Teach German at the university level.

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Customer Reviews

Perfect teacher
Teach Yourself German Complete Course Package is an excellent book with audio CD added. Step-by-step studying, nice explanations, very good wxamples. Fully recommend.

Not new at all
First and foremost: this "new edition" does not have too much new in it, so if you have the older edition (Teach Yourself German Complete Course) and it is still serviceable (meaning, not studied to tatters), do not buy it. Whatever Amazon says, even the page numbers are the same. The minor modifications are simply not worth the money. The newest thing in the whole book is the cover. To sum up, not a fully revised edition, but an updated one. This is why it got four stars and not five.

However, that relative changelessness is not a problem at all. This is an excellent book. The small modifications, e.g. writing the names of the countries in the now expanded EU, and redrawing the previously strongly distorted (European) map is a definite advantage, even if it does not really influence the learning experience.

Why is this a good language book?

First, you can learn at your own speed, to which you get all the necessary help in the book, which is full of good and simple (English) explanations. Of course, you may feel it necessary to buy a bilingual dictionary (my recommendation is Langenscheidt Universal German Dictionary: German-English / English-German (Langenscheidt Universal Dictionary) or the Mini Oxford) and a basic grammar book (e.g. Essential German Grammar), neither of which needs to be an expensive one.

Secondly, the book is well-structured and concentrates on common problem areas, such as prepositions and case. However, it is not overwhelmingly grammar centered: there are lots of conversations, and the topics are suitably selected to give the vocabulary and sentences for a hopeful tourist. The two CDs help a lot, too. True, you can buy the book without them as all the material on them can be found in a printed format in it, yet, if you have them, you can find meaningful listening exercises to them and they are also good for revision purposes and pronunciation practice.

At the end of the book you can also find some tips where to go further. One tip: Teach Yourself Improve Your German, CD package of the same series.

Sehr Gut!
The Teach Yourself series is generally good, though not always consistent in quality from language to language.

The Teach Yourself German book and CDs are definitely "gut". I took 2 years of German in high school, a semester in college and spent two months in Austria. Can I speak it now (20 years later)? Nur ein bisschen. :)

The material is presented in a reasonable way, building in complexity over time. The dialogues are not overly intricate and specialized, like some (e.g. "My uncle served in WW2 and now farms in Hannover.")

The sound quality on the CDs is good. Other languages are garbled and muddled, but not this one.