音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

Two months from the last post, it's all the weather's fault. Over 30°C for July and August burnt all my motivation of doing anything.

But after the long period of emptiness again, I'm expressing nothing more than complaints about the book "German For Dummies" that I bought many years ago. Haven't touched German at all in the past few years so this book -- which I never finished -- could be a good point to restart. I started reading it at the beginning of this month, but after just a few chapters, I began to lose patience, and I rushed to finish it this weekend. Feeling relieved, now I can just return to my antique 1950s book that uses the beautiful yet hard-to-read gothic font!

So, about the problems. Just like other For Dummies books, the authors are too "talkative". Too much nonsense, I mean. But I get that they want to give a casual feeling so I will just accept this as a minor problem to me.

Then, some more serious issues other than typos -- have found at least five so far -- since they didn't affect me I'll just neglect them. First, the whole book lacks organisation. (Too) Many examples use grammar/words that are never explained clearly in the same section. For the "Fun Games", which are supposed to serve as exercises, they often require words NEVER appear in the same chapter also. Besides, they're often repeating the exact same sentences as in the chapter. What's the point? Good exercises should be giving similar things so one can apply and derive from what they learned. To me, I'd just repeat the sentence that's important when I read it in the main text.

Next, the book doesn't cover what I, and probably most German learners, want to find. It does cover some basic grammar but that's all. The (literally) whole book, is about the present tense, absolutely unnecessary. The book claims that the present tense is the most common, but it doesn't mean that not touching other tenses at all is acceptable. It covers a bit in the past/future tense, but the information is too little and I don't get even a vague idea of how they look like. In contrast, the book does a good job teaching you how to make "Ich möchte" sentences, such examples are everywhere and really made me bored. It doesn't mention enough about many important things either, such as the second possessive case, and how to change adjectives according to the case/gender.

Finally, it gives you false hope. It says the book is for you if you don't want to memorise lots of words. False. How one can learn a language, even the most basic, without memorising words?? I didn't pick up this book because of this, but just hearing irritates me.
I'm okay with the bad illustrations (not the sectional cartoons, which are meaningless anyway).

This book is the worst so far among all paid books I've read (if including free books the worst would be a Python book that I deleted after reading 3 pages).
At least, I can now enjoy the intriguing German Gothics!
I have one more For Dummies, hope that can be better, but when I'll read it would remain unknown...