German the Easy Way (Barron's Easy Way) Review

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German the Easy Way (Barron's Easy Way) ReviewHaving completed a six-month crash course in conversational German, I could ask for the train station or if soup came with the meal, but my grammar still needed just a bit of polishing--okay, okay, I did everything in my power not to use a single adjective while in Germany. I thought this book would be just the thing: each chapter is set up as an exploration of one aspect of the German language, reference-grammar style, with page after page of exercises. And, of course that's the way to learn those adjective endings: use them, over and over again, until they get into your blood.
But in the event, the book was a disaster. The grammatical explanations are almost entirely un-illuminating; the layout of the material is unspeakably wretched. What can you say to a presentation of the "strong" adjective endings that is spread out across two pages with the following comment: "Most strong endings are the same as those of the definite article?"
Well, Professor Graves, you're on to a good idea there, since most students with a little German have worked the definite article under our skins. But why don't you just tell us which endings are different? Or present the endings in a single table on a single page with the der-die-das table off to the side?
Of course, he does neither of those things. The endings are one or two letters and would fit comfortably in quite a narrow table, but Graves must clutter up the presentation with useless debris, so one entry covers two lines of text: "brav_e_ Kind_er_" and on the next line, "good children." By providing English and German, he feels compelled to set off all of the German text in boldface, with the endings themselves--the important information--in bold italics. And, since bold italics have less width, less ink, and less visual "weight" than plain boldface, this has the perverse result of making the endings--the whole point of the table--harder to pick out of the text! To say nothing of the fact that the ending of the _noun_ receives precisely as much emphasis as that of the adjective, and that the width of the entries, combined with the spacing and the generous margins on the page, force him to deal with masculine and feminine on page 29, and neuter and plural in another table on page 30!
How on earth is the student meant to gain from this? What I want to see is the pattern of the endings, and how they differ from the pattern of definite article endings. In the end, I had to take out my pen and make my own table in the margin of page 30, continually flipping back and forth to copy out the half of Graves' table that was uselessly on the other side of the paper. I then wrote out a table of the definite articles, compared the two, and circled the genitive singular, masculine and neuter endings--the answer to the professor's little puzzle about which endings differ from the der-die-das pattern (they use -en instead of -es). After all that, I finally have some useful data in a usable format, and a pearl of insight into the adjectives that coy Professor Graves couldn't make the time to just put into the text.
Whatever he was spending his time on, it certainly wasn't writing good German text. Now, I realize that this is a basic-level book, and certain limitations exist. But my textbooks such as "Teach Yourself German" and "Colloquial German" somehow managed to come up with simple text that, although a bit stilted, managed to be useful, plausible, and even a trifle engaging. And here? "The splendid educational method of the parents results in the good manners of the well-behaved children." Now, this reads like something out of the Quotations of Chairman Mao in the first place, but there is a far more serious complaint to be lodged--wouldn't it be better if we were flipping back and forth through the book to look up the words for "envelope," "gas station," or "jacket" than "splendid educational method?"
Then we have the passage "Ein Witz" (A Joke), which really shows off the sheer terribleness of the writing, and adds a little casual sexual harassment as a bonus: "Shall I tell you something about the bookkeeper in our office?" "Yes, please." "Well, yesterday suddenly he steps up to our pretty typist, grabs her, and kisses her. At this moment the boss enters and says: 'For this I'm paying you?' What do you think, Mrs. Muller, does the bookkeeper tell him?" "I am anxious to know." "'No, this I do for free.'" It is easy to be boring, and it is easy to be insulting. Doing both in the space of one third of a page shows a unique literary ability.
In the end, I tried to tackle this book on four occasions. I thought to myself, yes, the writing is awful, but I need the practice. And perhaps there is some value to be wrung out of this book--but my time is just too scarce to waste it here, when so many other teachers have taken the time to prepare books that are actually useful and engaging. I will mention just a few: Nice and Easy German Grammar, Teach Yourself German Grammar, and 1001 Pitfalls in German, all of which soar where this book stalls.
I've now moved on to "Teach Yourself German Extra," and I'm back to interest, enjoyment and advancement. May I encourage you to profit from my mistake, and avoid making a fruitless detour into the morass of "The Easy Way?"German the Easy Way (Barron's Easy Way) Overview

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