A friend of mine’s been itching to teach himself German, and the library books he’s found on the subject have been pretty crappy, so I volunteered to make some inquiries. Basically, he’s looking for something that’s beginner-friendly and appropriate for independant study.
So… any ideas?
Just do a Google search for “German For Beginners” and you will find free on-line courses, and if you search for “German For Beginners Book” you will find some great options.
I had used a book years ago to teach German to an American friend who had moved to Berlin. I was going to search for it, but cannot remember the name of the book. However, just looking over everything that is out there now, they ALL look better than the book I was going to suggest using.
Have your friend try one of those Google options first.
However, the best way to learn a foreign language is to find a native speaker for real practice and pronunciation. Try contacting a local university to see if there are any exchange students who might want to give some private lessons.
Thanks for the advice! I’m usually be reluctant to google language materials, since some languages have a crapload of BS products that’re fairly hard to spot if you aren’t familiar with that particular language’s materials. I’ll pass both the website and book recommendation along to him…
And I appreciate the caveat, since I usually teach one or two languages courses per term and almost always run into some extremely weird misconceptions picked up from poor materials or unguided study. For him though, I think it’s more of a strictly casual thing; we’re both reading at a fairly decent research university, and he’s planning on taking german in 24 months when a spot opens up on his schedule.
Having taught ESL for years, I know full well what you mean.
I had one German guy, a big burly type (think World Wrestling Foundation) in one of my classes. When he spoke in German, he sounded like a German Jesse Ventura.
When the guy started speaking English, my jaw dropped to the floor. He spoke English quite well, but with an amazingly feminine French accent! It was so bizarre.
I found out he had a French girlfriend who spoke no German, so she had been teaching him English for the past five years - which is what they spoke at home.
You cannot imagine how difficult it was to teach him to pronounce English words so he didn’t sound like Edith Piaf on steroids.
That sounds like it must’ve been unbelievably hilarious in class.
Japanese is one of the languages I teach pretty regularly, and the popularity of Japanese anime in north america has become both a great boon and the bane of my existence as a teacher.
Number one, it’s really great: it’s in the language, short, easy to watch, and gives beginning students a lot of opportunities to practice listening to the language.
However, anime also teaches them other things. You can be about 80% certain that if there’s something unusual about a first year student’s speech, it’s something he picked up from anime. A lot of shows will try to be cute or trendy by making their characters speak in an extremely unusual way; they’ll talk in an unusually childish way, or use archaic terms that haven’t been used for the last 150 years.
The girlfriends with wonderful intentions are usually the worst culprits though; your German story reminds me of something that happened a couple of years ago: the American embassy in Tokyo apparently has marines stationed at the entrance to act as de-facto guards and what not; I honestly don’t know what they do, but one of their jobs is apparently to act as de-facto doormen by checking peoples’ ID and allowing them into the complex.
Anyway, one of my acquaintances told me about his friend, a marine who worked at the embassy in that precise capacity. He spoke little to no Japanese, but he asked his girlfriend to start teaching him the language, which she did happily. Unfortunately, as she wasn’t an experienced teacher, she neglected to note (or, for all I know, mention) the gender-specific elements. He took his cues from the way she talked, and so you ended up with a 6’8" 200-some pound marine with a machine gun waving high-ranking Japanese officials through and giving them directions in extremely girly Japanese.
I hear that it was standard practice for the officials to bow gravely to him, proceed into the building, and double over laughing the moment they were out of sight.
Apart from wholly independent study, the OP’s friend could also look into the Goethe Institute’s distance learning courses.
Heh, now I’m imagining what it would be like to listen to someone who learned English from watching Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd.
I love the stories of people’s odd language learning. I took Japanese in high school and my teacher was from Japan and at first, did not speak English very well. But she was dating a man from Boston and by the end of high school she spoke English very well, with a thick Boston accent. It was hilarious.
On topic, my college beginning German class used a text called Vorsprung which was pretty clear and useful. It also came with a workbook and a CD for listening excercises. BBC also has some cool online German excercises and activities, that I used as review before coming here.
Deutsch Heute 1 was good back in the day. I’m not sure if it’s still available.