Kontakte: A Communicative Approach (Student Edition + Listening Comprehension Audio CD)

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: 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).

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Summary: German is not just for marxists and sociopaths anymore.
Review: I would just like to respond to Anthony Adler's caustic, and if I dare say, arrogant review of Kontakte. Teachers like Adler seem to believe that students are only truly learning if they are suffering. Perhaps it would make Adler happy to see students toiling away memorizing thousands of arcane conjunctions from a withered, yellowing book written during the Weimar Republic. I, however, prefer a textbook like Kontakte that, informed by the latest research in applied socio-linguistics, provides students with a relevant and pleasurable introduction to the language and culture of contemporary Germany. Adler should realize the fact that most students at today's "highly competetive universities" don't study German in order to read Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, but to prepare themselves for future careers in business and international relations, or simply for their own personal enrichment. They don't want to become depraved, melancholic graduate students, but productive citizens of world, promoting the values of the free market economy and the American Way of Life. For this, I can not imagine a more perfect textbook than Kontakte.

Rating:
Summary: excellent for communicative, in-class learning
Review: I'm a native speaker of German and have taught first year German with this book - I love it, and so did my students. I think the communicative approach works great, the book offers a multitude of topics for interaction and communication. It explains the basics of grammar and allows the student to learn by using the language, rather than by memorizing rules. It is, as I mentioned, a book for beginners (first year) and not appropriate for any other level, and it is a book to be used in a class setting, not for self studies. It will not work for other learning situations, but there are other books for those settings. I have learned Spanish with the "Dos Mundos" book from the same series and with the same approach and found it the most effective language learning I have ever experienced. Used in a classroom applying a "natural approach" to language learning, this book is wonderful and an extremely effective way of starting with a new language!

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Summary: Kontakte --- sehr kool! sehr fun!
Review: Ladywisdom is so right. Kontakte is super-fun. Since I started taking it at UCSD (tres competitive!), I can say WHATEVER I want. I was talking to my girlfriend Uli in German(she's from Deutschland, but isn't a jack-booted, Lederhose-wearing, freakazoid like ours truly), and I wanted to get her to play the new Speers album, and it was like so cool --- I said "Spiel das CD auf dem CD-Spieler" --- a she TOTALLY knew what I meant. I love the Blickkontakte interviews, the cute pictures, and I'm learning sooo much. :)