Learning German Through Storytelling: Des Spielers Tod [The Player’s Death]

At first, I thought this would be too difficult but I began improving very quickly. With the Kindle and the Slavoed German English dictionary I’m rapidly increasing my vocabulary and comprehension. I like the characters. The stories held my interest. The small illustrations are curious — as if drawn by a fourth grader. I quickly bought the other two books in the series and recommend this to anyone learning German at the beginner plus or intermediate level. If the author writes more, I’m buying.

This is a detective story for people who want to improve their reading of German. The story itself grabbed my attention and made me want to read on. The structure is good. There are short chapters, a glossary at the end of each chapter, and multiple choice comprehension questions in German, with answers at the end of the book. The book has been proofread well, as I didn’t encounter any errors. There is generous use of modern idioms.

Enjoyed the story and learning new vocabulary. I am a level A2/B1 level student who is learning German for fun (!) The level was just right for me allowing me to read without difficulty but also offering the challenge of new vocabulary a definition of which is very conveniently included with each chapter. Questions on the reading are included with each chapter which is helpful in verifying that you have understood the content. Very please and will buy more titles from this author

Andre’ Klein does an ‘excellent’ job in teaching one the German language through storytelling. New vocabulary is taught and reinforced not just through repetition, but also by taking a stem word and weaving it into a compound word. The reader is exposed to both narrative and conversational German, along with idioms and various sentence structures (which I find absolutely beneficial to my learning German). A bit of humor is injected into this story. I must say, that I have learned so much from this book ‘without’ realizing that I was learning along the way – the author has done such a wonderful job at making learning a new language fun and easy. I am excited to pick up the other books that are apart of his series.

Of course, everything depends on your level of German speaking/reading, but for me this was ideal. The language was conversational, as advertised, and the stories in all four of the books were basic but interesting mysteries. Naturally, at this level of language the stories can’t be too involved, and I think that just the right balance between story level and language level was met very well. I would recommend these to late first year or second year German students who are interested in actually learning German, rather than fulfilling a graduation requirement.

Idioms are translated in the vocabulary at the end into their English equivalents, rather than their literal translation. I would encourage readers to literally translate the German for themselves. It can be an insight into the thought process relating to the German language.

The one shortfall, and a minor one, that I have noticed is that when the nouns are defined at the end of each chapter, the definite article is not generally given. Sometimes the alert reader can figure it out, but it would be nice to have it in the vocabulary at the end.

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