Short Stories in German for Beginners (Teach Yourself Short Stories) Paperback – November 13, 2018

This has been an excellent adjunct for learning German. I am multilingual and just starting to learn German formally. I'm working from a German grammar book, using Duolingo, and listening to videos. This book has added substantially to my understanding of actual, everyday German vocabulary and word usage. The stories are simple, and the sentence structure starts out very easy, using the present tense. The stories cover a lot of cultural ground, so you get a broad variety of topics that allow you to learn new words in a very easy, natural way, with vocabulary lists at the end of each chapter. I found I needed to look up a lot more words than the vocabulary lists included, but that's easy enough to do on the internet these days. I also had to look up the gender of a lot of the nouns on the lists, since that was not included (dudes...it should be easy enough to add a "m", "f" or "n" at the end of each noun on a list, don't you think? Other language books manage to do that), but again easy enough to do on my own. Overall, I recommend this book for German language learning and German language practice.

Great for keeping up with expressions for travel.

Once you get over the fear of not having to know/understand EVERY German word on the page, you relax and discover that you can figure out a lot of the entertaining little short stories. I have taken a few German classes in the past and still do Duolingo German, but at first this book stymied me. I don't know how a person who knows nothing about Germanic languages would fair with this book (and it's says it's a Beginner Level), but I am enjoying it. Each story is 3-4 pages long, with some words emboldened. Those words are in a small glossary at the back of each story. Also, at the end of each short story is a 5 question multiple-choice quiz. The answers to the quizzes are way in the back of the book. There is also a somewhat more extensive Glossary in the back of the book.For me, at my level, I appreciate learning the simple past tense of verbs, by reading! And the stories are entertaining! I mostly learned only past participles in German class. I purchased the French and Danish books, too. I have also taken some French in my past, decades ago, so I will probably do okay deciphering the French stories. I have never taken Danish, but it being somewhat Germanic, will muddle through that, hopefully. I love languages, so I am driven! I do my family's genealogy and am of German and Danish and Swiss descent, so these books are fun!

This book is for people who have a basic understanding of German sentence structure, pronouns, and words. If you're just going into this book with no previous knowledge you will have a bad time. I highly suggest this book if you're pairing it with another learning book/dictionary as it offers easy to read German and a quiz at the end of each chapter that isn't "fill in the blank with the word from the sentence" like I've found most others do. It asks you questions (In German) about the chapter and what happened in it. There are about 3 chapters per story so you're able to follow characters from one chapter to the next.

The stories in this book are really varied, not boring at all. They are quite short and you see your progress. If you have an e-book, it will definitely help you in understanding new vocabulary, since you won't have to spend time manually translating the text.I will definitely re-read German Stories for Beginners it in a few months and I'm going to buy the next Intermediate edition.In conclusion, I'd recommend the Beginner edition of this book to people whose German is between A2 and B1. Good luck and enjoy reading!

Exactly what I was looking for. Ecellent for brushing up my German

Exactly what I needed to get off of DuoLingo & to stop relying on my phone so heavily for learning. The stories are engaging and not so simple that you feel like you're being insulted. I don't know if I'm ready for it yet, but I've enjoyed the results of this book so much that I've ordered the intermediate copy. I'll do that review in German. For now, Vielen Dank und Auf Wiedersehen! Ich will lesen meine buche.

It is what it says it is, short stories in the German language to help you learn. I only speak a teeny tiny bit of German, this was a gift for someone else. She seems to enjoy it as a study aid.