Unlocking German with Paul Noble: Your key to language success with the bestselling language coach Paperback – 11 Jan. 2018

The media could not be loaded. This book is brilliant. I've never known a language book like it. There are tons of books where they list German-English translations, and it's up to you to use the info to teach *yourself* the language. But this book actually *teaches you* German. It's like the difference between learning science by looking at the periodic table (most books) and actually doing science experiments (this book).The idea is that you cover over the red text, and have a go at saying it yourself, then you check if you were right (see my video). This is a really effective strategy - far more so than just memorising phrases.It's easy to read, fun and enjoyable, and after just a few pages, you are already speaking some German and working things out for yourself, starting from the familiar and moving towards the less familiar. I had no idea that this sort of book format even existed.Are you fluent by the end of it? No, of course not. And it probably doesn't have as much German vocabulary in it as some phrasebooks do. But what it does do is really get you to understand not just the vocabulary, but also the grammar and sentence construction, so that you can use the building blocks you have learnt to construct your own sentences.I would 100% recommend this book.

It would be hard to overstate how brilliant this book is. The author has devised a (relatively) painless way to truly ‘unlock’ the beginnings of a way to start to get to grips with using German to communicate. The book begins very slowly and builds up with plenty of repetition. He always provides reasons or justifications for the way things are, if they are different to the way we speak in English. The temptation is to try to translate everything, literally, from English into German but that would sound odd to a German speaker: language, whether German or English, just doesn’t work like that. Each has evolved with its own syntactic and idiomatic peculiarities and Noble explains as necessary. For example, in the past tense, when a sentence has two verbs, the second goes right at the end, so you don’t know what is happening to the subject until you reach the end: e.g. in English it might sound like this – ‘I have the picture of the old grey horse to my cousin given’!If you are familiar with Michel Thomas tapes, the book is rather like those but in written form. There is not a great deal of emphasis on grammar, or gender: it is what it is – a device to get you going. There are also CDs available that follow on from this beginner book. The only slight ‘gripe’ I have is that there are a great number of pages wasted in the quizzes, that begin asking the reader to translate from German, on the left of the page, into English, given on the right side of the page, and then, from English on the left of the page, into German on the right of the page! It’s just as easy to cover the left of the page as it is the right! So why use up all that space?Other than that caveat, I cannot think of a better way to begin an exploration of the German language. Within a very short time you will be speaking German with confidence!

I wouldn't say this is for a complete beginner but to complement while you are learning German through other methods.This book is more about teaching you sentence structure and changes in "the" words (which is very very important). It does break everything down quite easily though to understand and that's what I enjoyed about this book the most the teaching method.The book is far too short but at the value of the kindle version its really really good. There are audio courses after this which I believe from reading reviews are roughly the same content of this book. Its a shame there are no other books but knowing how the teaching method works I can continue this way using other sources.Einen schönen Tag noch

I have been struggling, over the last year, to brush up a couple of languages I once knew, and to learn a new language from scratch, as part of my own small resistance to 'taking back control' and everything which related to June 2016. Nuff said. Ich bin Europäer. German is the one from scratch. And very difficult it has been, as though, yes, many many words have come into English FROM German, the sentence construction, the grammar rules, could not be more different. Not to mention such niceties as 3 different ways to say 'you' , 3 genders for nouns - which don't necessarily translate to the genders of real people - 'a girl' for example, ein mädchen, is neuter. And then we reached different ways of negating and saying not, which have varying placements in sentences. All very interesting, truly, but I was whimpering a lot.Enter, finally, Paul Noble. The man is brilliant. I am zipping along, learning to speak,. learning (and having fun) complicated sentence construction without realising I'm doing it. I am about a third of the way through this book but have also bought the audio course - which he suggests gravitating to once you have mastered the book and are asking 'what next' But as the audio course goes through a LOT of the information in the book - plus some slightly different examples, exercises and concepts, I am finding the two, book and audio, really complement each other.Best of all, from what i can see, the next stage after book and audio is then to feel confident enough to embark on watching TV programmes you know really well, dubbed into German and with German subtitles on, and of course, to fling yourself into trying to speak. And I DO believe that his short, accessible method will have me game to try.I am simultaneously brushing up my French (a language I am much more confident in, because in the main I don't much have to change the way an English speaker constructs sentences) and that is going swimmingly - though Mr Noble is teaching me short cuts and job lot ways of thinking I was never given when learning French 'traditionally' in school.And to think he does the same for Spanish and Italian too...can't wait!