Rating: 
Summary: Een goed boek.
Review: This was the closest thing I could find to a college textbook for first-year Dutch. Each chapter has about 4 grammar lessons, about 6 blocks of exercises to drill you on the grammar lessons, about 4 dialogues to read and hear on tapes which illustrate the grammar lessons, plus a couple of blocks on Dutch/Flemish culture. The whole thing is very well done. If you're willing to devote the kind of effort you would in a one-year college course, you should be quite satisfied. Bruce Donaldson is a good writer/teacher. The back of the book contains answers to all the exercises, very helpful for self-study. In the dialogues you encounter many common family and tourist situations. By the end of the book, you'll have encountered all verb tenses and many common grammatical constructions. In fact, you'll have a working knowledge of basic Dutch. There are a couple of things about the book I would like to see changed. At a few places, you're taught the correct way to say something, followed by a statement to the effect that in practice it's often said in some technically incorrect way that you are then taught at length. In effect, you're being taught slang. I personally don't like this in a text for beginners. I suspect that the author was influenced by the "colloquial" in the title. Another point is that the book doesn't have many vocabulary lists. You usually first encounter words in the dialogues or exercises. You can usually, but not always, find the word defined in the glossary at the back of the book. Get a Dutch-English dictionary to supplement the book. Sometimes grammatical constructions appear in dialogues long before they're formally explained in the text. You end up initially learning these things by rote without understanding them well. I assume this was intentional on the part of the author (we learned our native language this way). You just find yourself thumbing back to past dialogues at times. Since the dialogues are an essential part of the learning experience, I strongly recommend you shell out the extra money for the tapes. Dutch pronunciation is quite challenging, all the more reason to get the tapes. The bottom line is that I enjoyed working my way through this book and I'm satisfied with the amount of Dutch I was able to learn. I don't think anything else in print would have served me as well.
Rating:
Summary: Een goed boek.
Review: This was the closest thing I could find to a college textbook for first-year Dutch. Each chapter has about 4 grammar lessons, about 6 blocks of exercises to drill you on the grammar lessons, about 4 dialogues to read and hear on tapes which illustrate the grammar lessons, plus a couple of blocks on Dutch/Flemish culture. The whole thing is very well done. If you're willing to devote the kind of effort you would in a one-year college course, you should be quite satisfied. Bruce Donaldson is a good writer/teacher. The back of the book contains answers to all the exercises, very helpful for self-study. In the dialogues you encounter many common family and tourist situations. By the end of the book, you'll have encountered all verb tenses and many common grammatical constructions. In fact, you'll have a working knowledge of basic Dutch. There are a couple of things about the book I would like to see changed. At a few places, you're taught the correct way to say something, followed by a statement to the effect that in practice it's often said in some technically incorrect way that you are then taught at length. In effect, you're being taught slang. I personally don't like this in a text for beginners. I suspect that the author was influenced by the "colloquial" in the title. Another point is that the book doesn't have many vocabulary lists. You usually first encounter words in the dialogues or exercises. You can usually, but not always, find the word defined in the glossary at the back of the book. Get a Dutch-English dictionary to supplement the book. Sometimes grammatical constructions appear in dialogues long before they're formally explained in the text. You end up initially learning these things by rote without understanding them well. I assume this was intentional on the part of the author (we learned our native language this way). You just find yourself thumbing back to past dialogues at times. Since the dialogues are an essential part of the learning experience, I strongly recommend you shell out the extra money for the tapes. Dutch pronunciation is quite challenging, all the more reason to get the tapes. The bottom line is that I enjoyed working my way through this book and I'm satisfied with the amount of Dutch I was able to learn. I don't think anything else in print would have served me as well.
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