748 German Sentences

Rating:
Summary: A bit buggy, nicht wahr?
Review: This set was not quite what I expected. From the title and description I got the idea that it would be a collection of German sentences with translations and maybe some analysis. But it is instead a beginner's course, and the name refers to the fact that after digesting the tape, you can create (at least) 748 sentences by permuting the various words that you've learned. It's a two-cassette all-audio course, good for the commuter, but it is *very* basic, beginning with days, months, seasons, and numbers, and then playing with "muessen", "wollen", and "moechten", along with other verbs, to create simple sentences. The atmosphere is informal, with an English male (who sounds like a beginner himself) asking a German female how to say this and that. Sometimes the translations seem rather odd, as when "Do you have to walk?" was translated as "Muessen Sie gehen?" even though "spazieren" had been introduced shortly before. (Later they do comment that "gehen" can mean "walk"... though that would be "zu Fuss gehen", nicht wahr?) I kept getting this nagging feeling that some of the translations weren't quite right, but I was driving at the time and couldn't check... and I did catch them translating "you have to" as "du willst" and "Sie wollen". All things considered, it was interesting to find that on 16 August 2000 the bookstore page at their website did not have a listing for this set, though the French and Spanish versions were listed. Maybe the German version is new (in beta?) or discontinued. (Hmm. I later caught them translating "Do you want?" as "Willst du?" and "*Werden* Sie?". And their English could use some improvement too, as when they tell us that while every German noun takes one of the three genders, masculine, feminine or "neutral" [!], English nouns take "neither"!)

Rating:
Summary: A bit buggy, nicht wahr?
Review: This set was not quite what I expected. From the title and description I got the idea that it would be a collection of German sentences with translations and maybe some analysis. But it is instead a beginner's course, and the name refers to the fact that after digesting the tape, you can create (at least) 748 sentences by permuting the various words that you've learned. It's a two-cassette all-audio course, good for the commuter, but it is *very* basic, beginning with days, months, seasons, and numbers, and then playing with "muessen", "wollen", and "moechten", along with other verbs, to create simple sentences. The atmosphere is informal, with an English male (who sounds like a beginner himself) asking a German female how to say this and that. Sometimes the translations seem rather odd, as when "Do you have to walk?" was translated as "Muessen Sie gehen?" even though "spazieren" had been introduced shortly before. (Later they do comment that "gehen" can mean "walk"... though that would be "zu Fuss gehen", nicht wahr?) I kept getting this nagging feeling that some of the translations weren't quite right, but I was driving at the time and couldn't check... and I did catch them translating "you have to" as "du willst" and "Sie wollen". All things considered, it was interesting to find that on 16 August 2000 the bookstore page at their website did not have a listing for this set, though the French and Spanish versions were listed. Maybe the German version is new (in beta?) or discontinued. (Hmm. I later caught them translating "Do you want?" as "Willst du?" and "*Werden* Sie?". And their English could use some improvement too, as when they tell us that while every German noun takes one of the three genders, masculine, feminine or "neutral" [!], English nouns take "neither"!)