This book was amazing. Five big gold stars!

This book contains all five graded German readers from Peter Hagboldt’s Elementary German Series. The volume is a convenient size, and the glossary at the end is easy to access. This series is intended to supplement classroom study of the language. Its organization is incredibly scientific, with vocabulary words selected carefully and introduced at a steady pace in the readings. Hagboldt crafted this book (this series of five readers) specifically to avoid bombarding students with too much at one time. This is meant to be pleasurable, and it is. It is meant to introduce words in context, and it does.

It is not a grammar book. It does not teach German sentence construction or verb conjugation. It assumes that its readers will be studying these things as well, and that they’ll have a teacher to whom they can direct their questions. That was not the case for me, and even so, I was able to read and enjoy this book immensely. I was a little bit taken aback in Reader 3, when things switched to past tense, but I was able to catch on and enjoy the ride.

This volume has an introduction that explains its purpose, and each reader opens with a note to the student and a note to the instructor. Going in, students will know how many vocabulary words and how many idioms will be introduced in each section. Best of all, the words that are introduced are repeated, so that there is little need for intense, specific study; they’ll recur and be remembered naturally.

Each section ends with a review, and that leads me to my only complaint about this volume: there are no answers given for the review questions. If I’m trying to test my comprehension of a story, I’d like to be able to check my answers. Because of this lack, I was hesitant to use the review sections at all, since I’d have no way of knowing whether I was correct or not.

All in all, a phenomenal tool for studying German. I don’t know why readers like this aren’t more common. I would have liked to have something like this for French when I studied it in high school—what a wonderful way to learn! ( )