Rating: 
Summary: Kontakte --- An incommunicative approach to German grammar.
Review: ... Because I teach at a highly competitive University, the students tend to be intelligent and extremely diligent; they are, at the very least, capable of activitely applying themeselves to learning a language and using their rational faculties to understand grammatical patterns and apply them in the generation of original German sentences. The authors of Kontakte, however, seem to have little regard for this capacity of the brain. Instead, they think of learning a language as something purely passive; a process of osmosis, whereby, through the mere exposure to German utterances and their mindless repitition, students will magically gain a linguistic competence. Such an approach results only in tedium, disaffection, and resentment, and places a tremendous burden on the teachers, who are forced, if they wish to create any challenge for the students, to create their own material....
Rating: 
Summary: Recieving my book
Review: Aime was extremely quick with my purchase. The book was in great condition (like she said), even though it was used it could have passed for a new book. I would recommend purchasing from her.
Rating:
Summary: Recieving my book
Review: Aime was extremely quick with my purchase. The book was in great condition (like she said), even though it was used it could have passed for a new book. I would recommend purchasing from her.
Rating:
Summary: Kontakte: A Communicative Approach
Review: As a native German, I'm teaching German with this book for the second year at the University level. Neither me nor my students like this book - in fact, I consider it quite bad (I have taught with 3-4 other textbooks before, any of which was much better) : The "approach" is totally scattered, it tries to be so hip, while it's rather gimmicky with all its cute pictures and cartoons. Like a "lets get away from grammar"-kind of badge of honor, the book introduces a minimum of grammer, but in a confusing, incomplete, and at times faulty manner while expecting the student to "know" or understand lots of things that were never properly introduced. The students would be helpless without a teacher to untangle the mess for them. Also, the reading sections and vocabulary are rather inappropriate, containing words that are neither widely used nor easy to pronounce. This book hinders more than it helps the process of learning German in an enjoyable manner. I only use it to a bare minimum, just to stay on course with the units it introduces.
Rating:
Summary: I made mistake buying this one .....
Review: For this amount of money I expected much better book. Unfortunately I think that this is one of the worst books of this type. You can buy much better book for just a fraction of the price. The subjects are confusing and as they say "information-gap activities" are definitely not fun. You better know some German if you are planning to use this one. It is made of a quality material so I give it one star. This opinion is for the Fifth Edition.
Rating:
Summary: Simply marvelous
Review: Having attended a highly competitive university (so competitive, in fact, that I know how to spell the word... unlike A.A.) and taken six other languages before my study of German, I found that the approach of my teachers and the text made the German language immediately accessible to me. The method allows me to draw my own connections to my previously acquired languages (for example, some parts are similar to Greek... others French... others Spanish...). If we choose to ignore the gains made by postmodernism, we might note that this German text's language mimics the inductive approach to language learning taken by my notable Professor D.N. Freedman (who has been safely heralded by his peers from Harvard to Oxford as having 'genius'). For those of the populace NOT attached to a thesaurus as A.A., I think you will find this text a happy medium between immersion/induction (which leaves one stranded without grammar) and rote learning (which delays fluency).
Rating:
Summary: This book is useless!
Review: I am a regular person attending a NON-competitive community college and let me tell you all that this book stinks! It is entirely in German and makes no sense at all. Nobody in our class can even figure out what they want you to do. I have taken two years of German in high school and I am totally lost in the very first chapter. I think this book is poorly organized. If you must use this book for your class, I would consider looking around for a German class that you can transfer in which does NOT use this book!
Rating: 
Summary: I HAVE NOT NOW, NOR HAVE I EVER ... USED A THESAURUS
Review: I am happy that Ladywisdom (or Gunesophia as I shall call her in her beloved Greek) spent so much time learning orthography and typing at her "highly competitive" University. While my alma mater was somewhat remiss in teaching secretarial skills (though I do know a bit of grammar --- I would have written "For those of the populace NOT as attached to a thesaurus as A.A"), I did learn to think critically and skeptically, and, above all, NOT to expect that everything, and least of all a FOREIGN language, should be made "immediately accessible." German is a strange, wondrous and beautiful language, and not just a quirky transliteration of the principle commodities of an Americanized universe. If Kontakte were, as Gunesophia claims, a middle way between immersion and rote learning, I would have no gripe against it. In my opinion, however, it sacrifices the coherent treatment of grammar and trust in the students' active intelligence to a trendy (and, in its way, quite "postmodern") theory of language learning. An adult student can only be immersed in a foreign language when he immerses himself, not just absorbing "grammatical patterns", but attending to and thinking about them.
Rating:
Summary: good book, but not for self-teaching
Review: I learned first-year German with Kontakte and was generally pleased with it. There is a good amount of cultural context, and the design is lively enough to maintain visual interest.Do not buy Kontakte a self-teaching text or if you want a structural approach to language acquisition. For Kontakte to work at all, you absolutely must have a German speaker to lead you through speaking and conversation.
Rating:
Summary: Verleumdung!
Review: I must compliment Ladywisdom on a certain flexibility of judgement seldom found amongst that species of pedant to which she most surely belongs. I would, after all, have expected the sort of lady who would condemn someone's intelligence and learning simply on account of a single flaw of spelling (as if people whose "genius" is far better attested than D.N. Freedman's have not often orthographized in the most unusually and colorful manner) to be most disagreeably affected by Kontakte's rather casual approach to German grammar. It surprises me all the more that someone who has already learned six languages would be so "marvelously" pleased with the training wheels that Terrell and Co. provides for its students. Or that someone who has studied biblical exegesis with a scholar of the ilk of D.N. Freedman (whose Bible Dictionary, Herr Adler --- a good friend of mine, I must add --- has always deeply admired, despite certain theological reservations), and must therefore be aware of a language and literature of deep-reaching otherness (I would say "radical alterity" --- but why expose myself to the charge of thesaurizing) would not find something amiss in a German book whose authors are so deprived of feeling for the language that they purport to teach that they could not even find a German word for the title.
|
