Product Description

A supplementary textbook outlining fundamentals of the German language and providing help for common obstacles such as declensions, pronoun agreement, time expressions, and letter writing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #828343 in Books
• Published on: 1987-03-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 215 pages

Customer Reviews

A must have!
A girl down the hall in college had this book, and I found myself borrowing it probably once a day. Finally, she ended up giving it to me. The reason it is so helpful is that it lists the mistakes you are likely to make as a native English speaker learning German and then tells you how to correct them. It goes through all the parts of speech in a very clear and engaging way. It really had me exclaiming "Ah ha!!" at a rate of something like 3 times per page. Great as a supplement for a German course and for someone trying to learn on their own. If you are looking to buy the essentials for learning German, I would recommend this, "Teach yourself German Vocabulary" of the Teach Yourself series, a good dictionary, a verb book, and a good intermediate short story reader. Then you can feel confident enough to move on to primary texts!

A good book with condensed rules and examples to learn from
After being out of school for quite awhile, you start to forget a lot of things about the constructions of sentences in your own language that you really have to know to begin learning another language. This book quickly refreshes your memory and then dives right into the German language. Just what I needed.

Then come the language pitfalls. I found this book very good in giving you condensed rules of thumb for every topic that a native English speaker tends to have problems with. I particularly like the way that they gave about 5 different examples and their English equivalent to highlight the points they are trying to make.

The book also alerts you easier ways to recognize the meaning of German words to help build your vocabulary. Like German "d" is English "th". Or German b is English "f". So, German "dieb" is English "thief". If I had to say something bad about the book it would be that the books contents are lay! ed out a bit messy, but not enough to get you to toss it in a corner.

Table of contents:

Parts of speech

1 Adjectives and Adverbs

2 Cases, Articles, Der- and Ein- Words

3 Conjunctions

4 Nouns

5 Prepositions

6 Pronouns

7 Verbs

Sentence Structure

8 Word order and Sentence Structure

9 Punctuation and Division into Syllables

Special Aids

10 Numbers, Measurements, Time Expressions

11 Pronunciation

12 Vocabulary Building, Confusions, Regional

Variations

Bibliography

Index

A Great Addition to any German Learner's Library
I've noted that a few of the reviews for this book are doubtful as to whether or not it's sufficient enough to learn German with. I can answer that question: no, it's not. What's more is, it's not supposed to be!

This book is geared towards going over all of the most common mistakes and problems that an English speaker who is learning German will encounter in their studies. All of the questionable points of German grammar, word order, etc., that an English learner will have, is most likely covered in this book.

I generally look over something in this book *every* day, and it's helped me a great deal. Definitely 5 stars from me.