German book review

I'm teaching myself German from this book, but I'm very much underwhelmed with it. I've written a quite strongly negative review which I intend to post on Amazon, but as it is extant reviews are four or five star, I thought I'd post it here first in case I was missing something. Those who have used such books before, am I right to complain about the things I do below, or should I just expect them as par for the course for teach-yourself language books?

Possibly this book was a good one once, but if so, its modernisation leaves a lot to be desired. Each lesson contains words which are not in the lesson's vocab list, and some of them are not even in the dictionary at the back. Whilst at home I can translate the word online, it means, however, that I can't study new material when away from an Internet connection. Moreover, many lessons contain grammatical forms that are not introduced until a future lesson, leaving the student, if studying by themselves as I am, struggling to understand the text. Then in Lesson 11 (as far as I've got so far) an exercise demanded grammatical forms of several words I'd never met before (and therefore couldn't know their gender).

In addition, the answers section at the back gives answers to questions that do not exist (I have not yet come across questions without answers, though); and some of the vocab appears to be either obsolete German—my German girlfriend was left scratching her head to think of a single example when I quoted that the plural of -mann in most compound nouns is -leute, for instance)—or either non-idiomatic or plain wrong (depending to which of my German friends I listen to). (The example was using Sprechstunde to mean "surgery" rather than "consulting hours".)

Whilst I appreciate that the book is not intended for use as a phrasebook, some of the choice of subjects strikes me as a bit bizarre. Lesson 2 is "The Sailor", teaching me such useful words as "ship", "sail", "mast" and so forth; hardly the most useful words to be starting to learn German with; and whilst "At the Fancy Dress Hirer's" (Lesson 7) gave me some useful words for clothing, I'm not sure the comedic value outweighed the distraction from useful vocabulary in teaching me the German for "Star Trek costume" or "Bride of Dracula".

None of the above stopped me from using this book to teach myself German, but they did make the task slightly harder and more frustrating that it had to be; consequently I would not recommend this book if there are others to be had that do not suffer from these flaws.

מַשִׁיב הָרוּחַ וּמוֹרִיד הַשָּׁלֶג

London's largely been missing out on the fun and games with the snow, but yesterday three inches fell between the Torah service and the end of mussaf. I made a snowman afterwards, and took some photos at night. I wanted daylight photos too, but when I went to take them today, I found the snowman lurching over at a strange angle, and half of its head missing.

At first I thought somebody had tried to destroy it (as happened to curious_reader's snowman the winter before last), and failed. I did have some kids come up yesterday and say "...and when you've finished, we try and destroy it, right?" I also, later, saw from my window at least two people take photographs, one child have to be restrained by his father from attacking it, and another child throw a snowball at it (talk about attacking a defenceless victim!).

When I tried to repair it, though, I found the snow had turned all powdery and wouldn't stick together to form a giant snowball; and when I tried to press further snow onto the head, the head fell apart further. So it looks like maybe it was natural damage after all. (I'm not used to snow turning powdery like this; what normally happens here is that snow partially melts, and then refreezes, so ends up percolated with gritty ice.) The tilt to the snowman, however, I'm at a loss to explain.

Here's some photos from last night, and after I'd done what repairs I could:

( Clicky clicky )

[ETA: Just checked out the window, and the head's fallen off altogether. Looks like I photographed it at the right time! (Plus, it's forecast to thaw on Tuesday and rain on Tuesday evening, though not until after a -6° low tonight.)]