|
 |
Best German Courses/Books? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| dizzycloud Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6385 days ago 88 posts - 109 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Turkish | Message 1 of 10 26 October 2010 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Hey everybody,
I am a native speaker of English (UK) planning to learn German (from scratch) and to live in Germany for an immersion experience within the next year, however there are just so many books and courses on the market that I don't quite know which one to go for. I have tried Assimil before so I'm very tempted to get it again (though I'm not a fan of the Teach Yourself range so I'm avoiding that!) Any suggestions? Danke in advance :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hardheim Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4986 days ago 34 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, French | Message 2 of 10 27 October 2010 at 4:57am | IP Logged | ||
|
My daughter wanted some help trying to find a program to learn German a while back. Since I'm interested in linguistics, I naturally had to do a detailed analysis of most major products on the market. Here is what I thought.
Pimsleur - I was so impressed skimming throught the 3 levels of the German, that I decided to use this for French and Spanish. The one caveat I have with Pimsleur is that it definitely should not be your only program. After a basic intro with Level 1, I would start adding other things to the mix. Pimsleur can definitely make you feel that you are further along than you really are, as I am finding out with Spanish. Living Language Begin/Inter. - Easily the best textbook course on the market. I would go here to make the grammar very understandable. Living Language Advanced - A really nice course that is more like second year college German. If you get through this, I would think you would be at a solid intermediate to upper intermediate level. Rosetta Stone - Almost useless. I can see where it would help with some vocabulary expansion, but the lessons gradually refer to more abstract concepts which are hard to capture in those pictures which leads to a LOT of confusion and frustration. I speak German, and had a difficult time trying to determine which picture was doing what. I don't know how a learner is supposed to deal with this. I'd pass on this one, especially given the price. Michel Thomas - Had to pull the plug on this one early. The bumbling students were too distracting. Some people really like his method, but I found it annoying, and I didn't think his pronunciation was all that great; even though German is supposed to be the one he pronounces the best. That just makes me wonder how bad his pronunciation is on the French and Spanish versions. Teach Yourself - This is a poor man's Living Language. It offers nothings that LL doesn't do better. Schaums Outline German Grammar - Really solid reveiw grammar. But, I would only go through this after you have worked the Living Language Langenscheidt's Basic German Vocabulary - Probably the best $20 anyone learning German can spend. Gives you the most common words 1-2000 and 2001-4000 used in German with sample sentences, plurals, principal verb parts etc. I really, really, really, really wish Langenscheidt or someone else would make something similar for French and Spanish. Edited by Hardheim on 27 October 2010 at 4:58am 14 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4960 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 3 of 10 27 October 2010 at 10:24am | IP Logged | ||
|
Thanks, Hardheim for the information. Those courses I have experience of, about 2/3 of the total, I agree with you completely on, so I guess I would feel the same about the ones you mention I have little or no experience of. You may have saved me a great amount of money as I was thinking of buying a Rosetta Stone course, so thanks once again.The only one you don't mention is Assimil, which I am a great fan of, but to use it for more obscure languages you have to have a fairly good command of French. I think Pimsleur can give you a false confidence, because it gets you to a good basic level fairly quickly, but your knowledge is still only that of a beginner.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5773 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 4 of 10 27 October 2010 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||
|
My recommendation is to focus on vocab and listening at the start, and gradually move into more and more reading (especially with audiobooks to go with the books).
At the start, you need to do a lot of listening in order to grasp the sound system and the rhythm of the language. Learn to love the sounds of it, and try to imitate it. You also need to rapidly learn the basic vocab so that you can start to understand some real sentences. A brief glance at some grammar examples will probably also help you to piece things together, but there's no need to memorize any tables or anything. For vocab, it can be quite handy to use some of those little phrasebooks. I've looked at a lot of German phrasebooks and compared, and I think that one of the best is the Kauderwelsch "German, word by word" phrasebook. There are actually a lot of nice explanations in it, and they do a word-by-word translation of all the phrases, in addition to the regular English translation. Another one that's good just for sheer number of words, is the Lonely Planet German phrasebook. You can also try downloading some of the shared decks in Anki, and working through those. Ok, so the next step (or even simultaneous step) is to move into native materials, especially books. I recommend Harry Potter, since it's fairly easy as novels go, and there's a great audiobook. Rufus Beck reads the German audio version, and he's fantastic! The problem for you is that at the start, you won't know many of the words. You can balance this out a bit by spending more time at the start doing some lookups, but I also encourage you to just listen and read, even if you don't get it all. You'll get a lot from the voice-acting that Beck does, and from the surrounding words that you already understand from their relatives in English. If you sit back and try to enjoy the book as much as you can, you'll get into it a bit more and you'll start getting partial meanings of the words from context. From the little bits and pieces that you get, you'll be able to get more and more of the story. Keep a highlighter pen around for the words that you see multiple times and you really want to know. Just highlight it, and keep reading, and then you can go back later and look them all up at once and put them into Anki or some other flashcard program. Last year I did something like this for several months. At the start, I hardly understood any of Harry Potter, and I also didn't get much of the TV shows I was watching. By the time I got to book three in the Harry Potter series, I actually had begun to understand quite a bit. When I got to book 5 I understood almost everything. The thing that's nice about the audiobook is that it'll keep pushing you through the text. Instead of going super slowly and getting stuck on every word, you're pushed to try to make sense of the general story, and you get much more exposure to the language. You can go back and look up some of the words, but your desire to find out what happens in the story will keep you going back to the audiobook to find out. Now, keep in mind that this is all passive. When I first got to Germany, I could read a real novel and understand almost everything, but I still spoke mostly like a beginner in terms of my expressive ability. At some point, you're going to have to decide to start trying to speak, and there are differing preferences on when to do this. Some people prefer to start right away, but since you're not coming to the country for a while then it should be fine if you decide to wait until you have high comprehension (because then you'll have the handy ability to tell which things "just sound right" to you). Above all, the most important thing is to find stuff that's interesting to you. It doesn't matter if everyone in the world rates a certain textbook as "super awesome" if you find it boring, because then you won't continue with it. For most people, "interesting" usually equates with actual real native material such as books and movies, so then your task is to shoot through as much basic vocab as you can so that you can jump into native materials sooner. And don't be afraid to use the native materials as your guide of which words to learn. You can learn the words as you come across them. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6736 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 5 of 10 28 October 2010 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I second the recommendation for the Living Language course.
Also, the Assimil courses are great - either the older German without Toil or the newer German with Ease, which is much easier to get and just as high quality - but may be a little overwhelming if you're starting from absolute zero (though you can judge this yourself, having had some experience with Assimil). I'd personally recommend it after getting some grounding with LL, Pimsleur, L-R, or whatever you like. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4960 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 6 of 10 04 November 2010 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||
|
As I said above, I am a great fan of Assimil - I think I have learnt the most from their courses, although not in the way they recommend. I have tried to learn whole dialogues off by heart, which is fine for the early, simple lessons, but a serious challenge for te later ones. Has anyone else tried this? It's about te most effective method I've found Edited by Old Chemist on 04 November 2010 at 1:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5361 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 10 04 November 2010 at 5:22am | IP Logged | ||
|
I highly recommend the old Assimil without Toil. It is the best method I've found for German. It can be demanding to get through, but it leaves you with a solid basis.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6890 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 8 of 10 04 November 2010 at 8:37am | IP Logged | ||
Currently doing it at the moment with the older Assimil without Toil. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
