Short Stories in German for Beginners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn German the fun way! (Foreign Language Graded Reader Series) (German Edition) Kindle Edition

These stories are wonderful! I had recently finished my Rosetta Stone German course. It took me 4 years! You might guess that working so slowly through the course, I had only a basic understanding of the language. I followed the author’s instructions and read each story through without looking up ANY words. I still got the gist of each story well enough to answer most questions. Then I went back and read the stories again, looking up the words, phrases, or sometimes whole sentences I didn’t understand (easy to do with the Kindle App.) I enjoyed every story, and I am slowly getting a little bit bigger vocabulary. You should have at least a basic understanding of German before tackling this book. I recommend this book to anyone trying to improve their German!

I love to practice and improve my German by reading stories in easy German. This book was perfect for that. It contains a variety of amusing stories. It is well organized for learners. Important words and phrases are highlighted and explained in a glossary at the end of each chapter of each story. There is a German summary at the end of each chapter, and 5 multiple choice questions in German to test comprehension. The book must have been proofread well, as I found no errors.

I started learning German a few months ago with Duolingo and Mango. I was surprised at how much I could pick up or still understand as far as "filling in the gaps" despite my limited vocabulary. I would highly recommend this book and the stories are fun!

This would be okay except there are logical errors (such as changing the names of the characters) which make it very hard to figure out what is really going on. The German is fine, but it is the weird logic that makes no sense to me. These stories would be very odd if they were written in English (my native tongue.) But compounding the German, and it is an extremely frustrating hurdle. I was constantly asking "Why did the person do that? Who did what to whom? Who is Theodor, when he was called Emil two sentences ago?????" Besides, the logic was so far out there that I doubt that anybody would do anything like that. For example, "Die Truhe" was really a mess of a story. Its ending was very unsatisfactory, and that wasn't the only story that I found utterly confusing.

The series of short stories is varied in setting and genre. It was good to read and practice my German again - though I still needed to read most stories with a dictionary on the side for a few words. I was happy with the book for the language I learned, the stories and plots were a secondary feature and were generally straightforward settings for expanding knowledge of the language.

I love that this book doesnt have that much complecated word, i mean its for beginners. I do love that the stories are very catching. I have learned quite new words, and i feel i have improved my german reading this method. I do like to write on my books and this one is no exception. I write y highlight the word i dont know. I would definitely buy the intermediate book from the same author

I have yet to read this version but I see it’s the same stories as the French version. It was great in helping me learn French. I’m too knew to German to get into it yet. The title is a little misleading. I think you need to be closer to intermediate to understand them. But after a few months on an app like duolingo these are great.

I've been using Duolingo for years and recently finished the German course. Someone told me once that a great way to keep up on language skills was to get children's books in that language and that has proven to be beneficial. I saw this book though and decided to give it a shot. Glad I did. These books are a great way to not only extend but to enhance my learning as there are words in here that I didn't learn via Duolingo and it has a glossary for any word in bold. I loved this book so much that I started getting them in the other languages that I am currently learning. I definitely recommend.

This book looked like a set of stories to help to learn German, however the first story seemed familiar, and all the others (bar one) as well. Then I realised they were all in an earlier Kindle eBook that I had bought:-German Short Stories For Beginners: 8 Unconventional Short Stories to Grow Your Vocabulary and Learn German the Fun Way!also by Olly Richards. This has a front cover showing castle towers.So this earlier book was very good, but I thought this one would be a different set of stories. Be careful to buy just one of them! I returned this latest version for a refund.

Have just taken up learning German again 30 years after doing my A-Level. Whilst I have remembered much, I've also forgotten a lot of the basics, so this book was a real asset. The stories are all 3 chapters long, each chapter between 3 and 6 pages (they get longer through the course of the book). All the stories are fairly simplistic (people getting lost, hiking, travelling, pirates, vikings etc.) but that's not the point - its the ease of reading them and remembering things that counts.There are highlighted words with a matching vocab list at the end of each chapter. The recommendation to read each chapter through once without trying to battle with every word, then read a second time and use the vocab if necessary, is good advice. Also, many words are repeated frequently, which helps with memorising new vocab.For me, I noticed a fundamental shift in my reading about halfway through the book: I stopped translating everything into English in my head when I was reading and just read the German text and immediately understood it and kept reading. It was a lightbulb moment when I realised what I was doing.Very easy to just read a chapter or two before bed. Strongly recommend this book to those with some German knowledge but looking for noticeable improvement over a short period.

I'll start with the good. If you read this book all the way through, you will improve your German. Words that Olly thinks you won't know are in bold and are listed in a short glossary at the end of each chapter, great! And there's plenty of interesting vocabulary given the wide range of genres and settings. Apart from the first short story, they are written in the Präteritum, the natural German story-telling voice, the one you will need to get used to for reading any authentic native literature.Unfortunately it's a long wade through thick mud and without a good degree of stubbornness, it's a hard journey to the end.There are lots and lots of short sentences. The majority of the sentences only have one clause, occasionally two, rarely more and plenty that start with Aber and Und, and clearly should have joined with previous and current sentence together. The choppy sentences make it hard to get into the flow of the stories and gain any enjoyment. As an example, here is my translation of a paragraph from the bonus chapter: In the tower lived a big creature. It could fly. It had a long, strong tail. And it could breathe fire! It was a dragon. He was called Ferrg.This style is irritating to say the least.There is a fair amount of space wasted with the inclusion of elementary dialogue. For example, most of the stories contain a greeting sequence such as "Hallo Hans" "Hallo, Greta" "Wie geht es dir?" "Mir geht es gut".I suspect that Olly has chosen to include these phrasebook examples for pedagogical reasons - but considering the target reader, it's just reducing the ratio of interesting content.One or two odd choices of glossary words, given the book is aimed at A2-B1. e.g. müde, fliegen. One can be expected to deal with situations set in an airport in an A1 exam, flying won't be an unknown verb. This doesn't happen too often though.I largely ignored the questions at the end of each chapter, but if I check them, I see that they ask questions using the exact same vocabulary as used in the chapter - one could slot in the correct answer by matching up the words by sight, not having a clue what said words meant. They don't check the reader's comprehension, the space could have been better used to develop the characters.Speaking of which, the characters lack any real depth. You rarely get to know any of their motives or see any of their personality nor quirks. Further to this, their actions are rather naïve in some cases; they seem to have this odd tendency to let strangers they've just met into their houses - idiotic.Olly has a great blog for people who are interested in learning a language and hopefully some of his collections of short stories in other languages are an improvement but I don't think I could recommend this one in it's current state unless you are stuck for things to read at this level.

Easy to get into the stories and the vocabulary at the back of the section comes in useful for working out the bits you did not quite get. Then a quick quiz to ensure you understood and the story continues.I just wish that Audible can read a book at the same time as you read, better way to improve vocabulary when reading a foreign language.Please can we have 'immersion reading' for adults on Kindle?

Good stories, but kindle navigation is shockingly bad. Accidentally touch the screen and it takes you to another universe. Click a word to check meaning and same again and have to page back 500 pages. Why no usable navigation. It’s a teach yourself book, it’s expected that you won’t know all the vocabulary and I don’t think I should carry my big dictionary around with me