Introductory Courses FSI Programmatic Pimsleur Michel Thomas German - foundation & advanced BBC Deutsch Plus (older course on youtube) Deutsche Welle Audio Tutor (from Book2 folks -no transcript -pay $10 to get one) Main Courses -bilingual Deutsche Welle -Deutsch Warum Nicht + Wieso Nicht + Deutsch Interaktiv FSI German DLI German (great for grammar review after using another course) Hugo German in 3 Months & Advanced (grammar heavy) Assimil German (old or new) + advanced (requires reading French) Living Language Ultimate Beginner-Intermediate & Advanced -skip current offerings from them and find this course on ebay or Amazon Linguaphone German + advanced/second stage Colloquial German 1 & 2 Teach Yourself + advanced (Perfect Your German/ Improve your German) Fokus Deutsch - put out by Annenberg Media who also coproduced French in Action and Destinos. No longer available from them or through Geothe-Institut but "findable", with textbooks etc. cheap from Amazon. Not as extensive as Destinos/FIA. Main Courses - monolingual from German publishers - all use communicative approach for classroom use and by CEFR levels- strong points grammar and reading, weak points the audio which is not dialogue based for the most part Aspekte 1-3 (buy used and get textbook, workbook and audio only) DAF Kompakt +many others Followup (pick several) Deutsche Welle advanced offereings (B1+) - enough to take you to C2 Various German publishers advanced courses to take you to C2 Readers - extensive selection up to B2 by various publishers w/audio Google Books -LOTs of 100 year old+ books but need to read Gothic typeface more detailed grammar review keep cramming vocabulary OR spend hours a day on intensive/extensive reading Miscellaneous tips: enable German keyboard on your computer/device learn to read Fraktur script -makes older books accessible Grammar & Usage Practice Makes Perfect series - cheap and good Schaum's Outline series A/B/C Grammatik - monolingual grammar course by Schubert Publishing with extensive exercises Sandberg: German for Reading (out of print and likely to remain so and horribly expensive used, unlike his texts for Spanish and French which are still in print, but "findable" -see links in HTLAl thread) Dartmouth College German Grammar Review University of Michigan German Grammar Deklination von Adjektiven about.com German site - great for learning and review of short snippets of grammar Martin Durrell: Using German: A Guide to Contemporary Usage and German Grammar & Usage (many editions - considered by many as the German grammar "bible") K.B. Beaton: A Practical Dicitonary of German Usage (fantastic resource for advanced learner -disambiguates german words but arranged by English words - out of print and hideously expensive used but "findable") R.B. Farrell: Dictionary of German Synonyms (another great usage book and the less comprehensive basis for Beaton's work it would seem) Idioms spruecheportal.de redensarten-index.de - index of sites with idiom resources Vocabulary Thematischer Wortschatz - links to pages with vocab by theme Markt-Daten -business vocabulary University of Leipzig Wortschatz Portal woerterbuchnetz.de - wonderful collection of glossaries, including ones for various dialects, Middle High German, Grimm Fairy Tales & others Anki shared decks german-flashcards.com (free for basic use - largest deck for their langs) Monika Reimann: Grosser Lernwortschatz Deutsch Als Fremdsprache : Deutsch - Englisch (newer and older editions - over 15K entries - great thematic resource) Barron's: Mastering German Vocabulary: a Thematic Approach (5K+ words by thematic areas - good resource for a beginner) Vocabulary Lists associated with various courses Aspekte 1 & 2 (2 only has Greek translation) Laser: B1 wordlist B1+ wordlist B2 wordlist Mittelpunkt B1+/B2/C1 word lists (have to choose level and then individual lesson for a level to get link to lesson word list in MS Office doc form) Pronunciation FSI Programmatic Paul Joyce course guide to German pronunciation Univ of Iowa pronuciation resource for English/Spanish/German -great guide with mouth diagrams Online Dictionaries (links to German-English pairs -others available) WordReference.com dict.cc Collins Online Encyclopedias Wikipedia German Duden student encyclopedia
continued ... German Video Media NDR -news and documentaries and drama ARD Metiathek youtube easy: cheesy soap Sturm Der Liebe & others medium difficulty: TV Krimi Kommisar Rex (name refers to a dog! -fits right in here) hard: TV Krimi Tatort (goes back to 1970s) plenty of older German films German Print Media Reader's Digest German edition Readers Digest Swiss German edition Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) - the high bar for newspaper reading, i.e. business oriented and academic register Stern Bild - tabloid sensational type of news Die Welt Süddeutsche Zeitung Zeit Radio -while there are lots of stations, a great many of them have a significant part of their songs in English. For this reason, news stations are often the best. Deutschlandfunk -news and some music Antenna Bayern Info Digital - news -has lots of repetetive short segments Antenna Bayern Schlagersahne - pop hits mostly German SRW4 Baden -news and music SWR2 Archivradio - lots of old speeches and historical material List of German radio stations streaming live Miscellaneous Studien und Plaudieren - older German text using natural approach - updated to modern orthography Grimm's Fairy Tales - site has parallel mode with English zeno.org - large collection of older material in German Leselupe.de - site for books and poetry - while many links lead to texts that must be purchased, many freebies as well Horespiel Scripts -aimed at youngsters, but great for colloquial speech and dialogues Internet Archive collection of community texts in German (includes some modern works) Drehbücher - small but nice collection of TV show scripts, many of them long - great resource for dialogues (just ignore the set directions) Blogs German is Easy - very nice blog giving bite-size chunks of grammar and usage posts -bookmark it! Deutsche Grammatik 2.0 - fantastic but monolingual grammar with example sentences for every step of the way -available cheap for purchase as an ebook (seems like I'm forgetting something . . .)
Wotno Michel Thomas? Sadly lacking any explanation of the noun case system, but a very very good introduction to verbs and pronouns.
An oversight. I have sampled but never completed a MT course but know that many find great benefit in them. Perhaps Big_Dog can add it to the introductory section.
I will be glad to add it, but please give me the text and tell me where it should go in your excellent first post.
Introductory Courses FSI Programmatic Pimsleur Michel Thomas German - foundation & advanced <<-------- BBC Deutsch Plus (older course on youtube) Deutsche Welle Audio Tutor (from Book2 folks -no transcript -pay $10 to get one)
I am just adding a few recent items that have come up on YouTube: Transcripts for Deutsch Plus are here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/dplus/tvtranscripts/ The programmes for the more advanced Deutsch Plus 2 (mainly interviews) start here: The older BBC Deutsch Direkt videos (which add to the coursebook and workbook) start here: If you go to YouTube all 20 programmes follow on in the selection box.
Elexi, thanks for those links. I listened to the first 25 of 58 minutes of Deutsch Plus 2 and would rate it comparable to LL Ultimate Advanced in level (intermediate grammar + 2-3K vocab covering 90% perhaps). Without transcripts, a learner might want to wait until having passed the 5K vocabulary mark to get nearly everything, and I think it thus can be a very good review. While the interview segments seem somewhat scripted with the interviewees not giving longer freer responses, the documentary segments are typical of those found on NDR, which I have listened to from the beginning of my German learning last year.
Peregrinus - thanks for that, I have the published materials for Deutsch Plus 2 (course book and programme transcripts) and LL Ultimate Advanced, but have never got round to using them. I might go through the pair of courses together if the are comparable.
