Tackle head-on all the hurdles that you find hard about learning German
"Practice Makes Perfect: German Problem Solver" doesn't pretend that learning German is easy. Instead of covering the entirety of the language, it hones in on those areas where you might have difficulty--areas such as "der" vs. "die" vs. "das," capitalization and punctuation, subject-verb agreement, determiners and adverbs of degree, and phrasal verbs.
Features: A variety of extensive exercises for practicePractical and high-frequency vocabularyAnswer key provided for reference and quick feedback
Don't sweat those troublesome grammar areas any more! "Practice Makes Perfect: German Problem Solver" is your perfect learning tool for ironing out your troubles.
Sometimes it feels like German is so hard that the rules aren't impossible to master, but that the rules actually change as soon as you feel you've mastered them. Maybe the American brain was just not designed to speak or write perfect German. Or maybe I'm just stupid.
Speculation aside, "German Problem Solver" is by far the best book in the "Practice Makes Perfect" series that I've encountered. And since all of the workbooks I've used thus far have ranged from the good to great, that speaks volumes about how much of a punch this comparatively slim volume packs in its pages.
The book centers its focus where it promises to: on the problem areas, or those constructions, rules, and exceptions that are especially hard on those accustomed to English. It's like whoever put this volume together read Mark Twain's famed essay, "The Awful German Language" and designed a workbook specifically to address those concepts that English speakers just can't wrap their heads around when it comes to mastering German. Things like double infinitives and the even stranger passive voice sentences (what I call the "gehabt haben worden sei nightmare") are treated in depth (but not at some ridiculous length), as are the tricky irregularities that make it feel like trying to find footing in German by looking for rules is a game of grammatical Whack-a-Mole.
That "Practice Makes Perfect" is one of the shorter volumes in the series in no way negates that it's probably the most useful. It's corrected some of my bad habits (or at least made them less glaring), and it's improved my German writing. I won't know about my speaking until I take another trip to Deutschland.
Started in March lol. More of a slog than Infinite Jest.
The grammar is explained really really well and the exercises are unforgiving. You know you've understood the concept when you're getting it right for the genitive plural with a preposition. I wish I'd just committed to doing this rather than a formal course over zoom.