Kimberly Sparks

Another survivor from my high school days! German in Review was not actually the text used in my high school class, but was a book given to me by the instructor, when I complained that our text-book didn't explain the grammar very coherently. I am ashamed to say that I never returned this to him - I, who am usually so scrupulous about returning borrowed books... I wonder if Herr Schulz is still teaching, and if he still uses this title?

Divided into twelve chapter, Sparks and Vail's book addresses all the major grammatical questions of the beginning and intermediate German student. Chapter topics include: Verbs / Adjective Endings / Comparison of Adjectives & Adverbs / Prepositions / Time Expressions / Modal Auxiliaries / Passive Voice / Subjunctive II / Relative Pronouns & Relative Clauses / Conjunctions / Subjunctive I / Special Problems.

I used this many times to review...… (mais)

I've used this successfully with some of my intermediate students who haven't had much formal German instruction and need additional practice with specific grammatical topics. Generally it's quite good; the explanations are clear and the exercises in each section are graduated by difficulty. It does assume a reasonably good (although not huge) vocabulary -- i.e., someone with just a year of German might have difficulty not because of the grammar, but because too much of the vocabulary is unknown.

No book is perfect, of course, so a few notes on some of its weaknesses: Most of the sections include some English to German exercises, which I'm not a big fan of, as it encourages students to translate instead of understanding the language on its own terms. There are a number of topics that are not included which I've found my students tend to have difficulties with -- the big one is the inexplicable absence of da- and wo-compounds. It's also primarily a grammar review in a narrow sense, focusing mostly on syntactical and morphological issues, and not so much on problems involving usage or rhetorical structuring of language. The final section, "special problems", does touch on issues such as als/wenn/wann which tend to cause difficulties for English speakers, but it's not the main focus of the text. There's no discussion of flavoring particles (doch, eben, gar etc), which I think is unfortunate, as learning to use these words properly is a big step to making one's German sound more sophisticated.… (mais)