Learn German: By Reading Fantasy (Lernen Sie Deutsch mit Fantasy Romanen) Paperback – January 9, 2015

My German is good enough that I can read pretty much anything I want (the question is basically just how fast), so I may not be exactly the intended audience for this. However, since I'm always looking to improve, and since "Learn German by reading a fantasy novel" is pretty much the "me-est" thing Amazon's recommendation algorithm has ever suggested, I figured I'd check it out.Let me say first of all that the idea is a great one, and similar things have worked well for me in the past (like watching films first without subtitles and then with them): you try to understand something through the medium of the target language only, then repeat it with the help of a translation to fill in anything you may have missed. This way you're always testing yourself, and you can see yourself making progress (especially if you do it often). It's great. My problem is unfortunately with the book itself.I hadn't looked up anything about the book or the author before downloading it onto my Kindle, so I didn't know if it was an originally German book with its English translation or vice versa. But, like I said, I figured it was worth a look either way. Anyway, I started reading the first chapter in German, and was mostly struck by how awkwardly written it was. I don't have much of an ear for good versus bad prose in German, so I can't say anything about whether that was any good, but the "telling rather than showing" and shallow/superficial worldbuilding stood out to me from the start. I don't have much patience for that kind of thing. But for the moment, I was thinking "hey, at least it's in German -- I'll stick with it a little while longer."Then I reached the end of the chapter and started reading it again in English, and I thought: "ah, clearly this is a German book with an English translation!" This was an incorrect conclusion, of course, which I realized a couple more chapters in (when I went and Googled the title). But that's how bad the writing was in the original English. At that point, I just started laughing. Even though the prose in the German version didn't seem painfully bad to me (though, again, I'm a bad judge of that), the book's general flaws meant that there's not much the translator could have done beyond putting lipstick on a pig.This experience has further cemented my opinion that the best way to improve my reading skills is to seek out authentic, well-crafted German. Reading such works in this alternating format would probably be quite useful and educational. The German translation of an English novel of questionable quality, on the other hand, I think I can do without.

The book was a bit slow as it says that you can highlight the words you do not understand and then the english word would appear so that you could better understand the story line and that in fact did not work. I ended up using the language translator on my laptop instead. The company does make an offer for you to buy their program that will do this also, however i did not think I would have to spend extra money just to read the book.

I've read most of the André Klein books, and the German Beginner Reader by Brian Smith, so this was the next step. The story is terrific, it kept me wanting to read chapter after chapter. I just had the e-book, not the audiobook. I initially didn't like the fact that the English translation was after you finish the entire German chapter, but this prevented me from checking every single word, and I was still able to understand most of the vocab, occasionally going back to the German to check a few words. This book is fairly long, so you get a lot of learning for your money. Highly recommended for the intermediate level German learner.

It's suppose to be a german-english book for beginners, but the sentences in the translation are not 1 to 1. Some sentences are broken up into 2 in the english or vice versa. The book uses idioms which do not translate between languages and therefore the corresponding sentences do not contain the same vocabulary. This makes it difficult to get good use out of the text, for a beginner. Those things should have been completely avoided for its intended audience. It seems like the story was written in one language, then post-translated into the other. The authors should have wrote the book in tandem paragraph by paragraph so the above failures could have been avoided. Overall, it's not much more useful than finding a simple or 'light' german text and using google translate.

After struggling through the beginning I eventually became interested in this story. However, I question how much I will ever use all the vocabulary surrounding the subject of sorcery in the book. I also found it difficult to go back and forth between the English and German versions of the same chapter in order to look up the meaning of new words.

Excellent, I really enjoyed this book. I liked the story and was surprised at how much of the German I could understand. I was a bit concerned at first when my default German language dictionary didn't work with this book.....but I do believe that my German language skills did improve as I progressed through the book.....and if you're having one of those days where you just can't concentrate on German language, the English chapter is not far away.I'm eager to start reading the next book to see what happens to Blaise and Gala....

This is a decent novel written with learning German in mind. Chapters are first in German, then in English, so remember the primary purpose of the book is to LEARN GERMAN, not be a great work of fiction. Still, I've only read part and I like it well enough to stay interesting. German was my first language, but I'm really, really rusty. So this is slow, but I can feel the oil on the hinges beginning to work.

These books are a really good way to learn German and the story is very entertaining - actually I'm surprised there's not a movie of this. I'd say they're suitable for people at the B1 to B2 level and upwards. If you're on B1 you might find these books quite hard at first, but it's worth persevering.

Amusing ideea so farI have only read the first chapter.My main criticism is that I prefer the parallerl texts where the translation is more available: here you had to turn over several pages to find a word which might not be familiar

Does what it says on the cover.

Useful way of learning. I would have preferred it to be more like Penguin parallel texts which have side by side, per page translations.

Too difficult to read as situations are not realistic. Translations are difficult to cross reference and also not helpful

Good cocept - rather a peculiar subject