Rating: 
Summary: Easy to understand and Fun to Use
Review: I have always wanted to learn German but have always been intimidated to do so on my own and haven't had the time to sit in a class. I picked up this book based on the internet recommendations. It truly is as good as everyone says it is. The explanations are clear, the exercises are enjoyable and the order of chapters allows one to progress quickly. In fact I like this book so much that I can't wait to get home at night to look at it. In just four or five weeks I have learned enough German to be comfortable to begin looking at real German texts. I also bought "Schaum's Outlines of German Grammar" 501 German Verbs along with this book and the combination of the three has been most useful.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to understand and Fun to Use
Review: I have always wanted to learn German but have always been intimidated to do so on my own and haven't had the time to sit in a class. I picked up this book based on the internet recommendations. It truly is as good as everyone says it is. The explanations are clear, the exercises are enjoyable and the order of chapters allows one to progress quickly. In fact I like this book so much that I can't wait to get home at night to look at it. In just four or five weeks I have learned enough German to be comfortable to begin looking at real German texts. I also bought "Schaum's Outlines of German Grammar" 501 German Verbs along with this book and the combination of the three has been most useful.
Rating:
Summary: Thorough and fun!
Review: I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone. I am a doctoral music student who needed to pass the Graduate Foreign Language Reading Exam, and decided to try German...without any prior knowlege of the language. And less than five weeks to learn it! Additionally, I had already chosen a collection of letters by Beethoven as my specialized text, of course not knowing that it would contain a lot of convoluted sentences, archaic spellings, and non-standard grammatical structures.
But despite all of that, April Wilson's wonderful book gave me all the tools I needed to pass the exam in the first attempt and really enjoy the process of learning the language. It is apparent that she is extremely intelligent and has a great sense of humor as well. Her use of German proverbs (some of them hilarious), amusing stories, philosophic writings, and other running themes throughout the book keep it very entertaining, and the short, to-the-point chapters are clear and easy to grasp. The section on various German dictionaries, the glossary of common words, and many other informative sections are a great bonus. I also appreciated the overview of English grammar at the beginning of the book.
German Quickly is simply the perfect book for learning German, quickly!
Rating:
Summary: Perfect for language exams
Review: Like many other reviewers, I needed to pass a German language exam as a Ph.D. requirement. This was precisely the book I needed. It is very well-written, and the exercises are extremely engaging, especially when compared to other German texts.
Not all the exercises have answers, but many do. The exercises are very natural and reasonable--the proverbs are very nice, as well as the story of Fraulein Meier and the mailman, and the reading selections are wonderful. After only a few dozen hours of study, I was ready to go get some books and practice translating on my own.
When I bought the book on Amazon from the author, she included supplementary material at no extra charge, which was also quite helpful. For people who simply need to read and translate German, this book is perfect.
Rating:
Summary: A truly wonderful book
Review: To start with I didn't have any particularly keen interest in German. While browsing through books in the library I chanced across Ms Wilson's book and started leafing through it. I was really impressed by the flowing, homely style of presentation and I decided to learn the language seriously. Here are some of the salient features that make the book so helpful for beginners (this is the first foreign language that I have started learning, other than English which I learned as a kid):
1. Well chosen exercises after each chapter. To get the full benefit from the book, one must do all the exercises. I personally found that I could easily manage a chapter a day for the firsr few chapters, and then a chapter per two or three days for the later ones.
2. Sense of humor. Yes, in this regard it is doubtlessly one of the best textbooks that I have ever read in my life. And this is in sharp contrast with some of the other texts that are available in the market (for instance the texts that are used for the beginning German courses at Stanford. Oh, why are those books SO devoid of humor?)
3. Using proverbs to teach German. This is a great idea that should be used in teaching any language. Proverbs are those little simple sentences that somehow stick in our minds more than other things do. That's why they survive so long. Now Ms Wilson smuggles the German vocabulary into the reader's mind in packets of these proverbs.After reading the German for "When there is fire in the heart, there's smoke in the head", it is hard to forget that Rauch means smoke.
4. No language book for beginners can be expected to be full of real examples of great literary value, since those will be above the level of the average reader. But still the author creates the wonderful feeling of "real German" by quoting sentences and passages of famous German authors. This is in sharp contrast with the (popular?) German textbooks ... with examples churned out by machines to show the use of some grammar rule.
5. The book is well worth the money. I don't know why, but some German teachers at US univs prescribe textbooks that are written only to extract money out of student's pockets. The books ... force you to use manuals and workbooks that are sold separately, and are often full of silly pictures that do not help you to learn anything, but only serve to increase the price of the book. Ms Wilson's book, on the contrary, is full of serious information, and acts as a good reference book even after you through with it.
6. Finally, the book does NOT teach you how to speak German or how to comprehend spoken German. For that a good resource would be the book+CDs set from the "Living Language" series.
|
