This introductory German text emphasizes communicative proficiency. The method, called the natural approach, stresses the use of activities in a natural and spontaneous classroom atmosphere. Grammar explanations and exercises are aids to learning only, not the main part of the text. The materials are also comprehension-based: comprehension (listening to and reading German) is viewed as a prerequisite to using German (speaking and writing). This is the German equival… More >>
Kontakte: A Communicative Approach
This seller was the best seller I have ever gone through!!!!!
She sent out the book within a day of purchasing it. She was very easy to get in touch with.
BUY FROM THIS SELLER!
Rating: 5 / 5
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: 5 / 5
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: 5 / 5
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.
Rating: 1 / 5
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: 3 / 5