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German Grammar Drills
Sharpen your German grammar with skill-building exercises If you want to be proficient in German, you eventually have to clear the bothersome hurdle of grammar. The best way to conquer this obstacle is through hands-on experience. Covering all facets of German grammar--from prepositions and pronouns to verbal forms and tenses-- German Grammar Drills helps you learn often-perplexing topics with fun and engaging exercises. This comprehensive book features:
312 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2007
103 people are currently reading
221 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 7, 2016
Took me 39 days to power through this book, making lots of notes along the way. The book is organised pretty well and the explanations are clear. Some of the last chapters are heavier than most chapters, and some ideas are left out, but nothing that a quick Google search doesn't solve. However, it would have been nice to see everything in the book. For example, it wasn't explained how to use indirect speech when the speech is already in the subjunctive mood. Not a big deal.
I haven't completed all the exercises yet. However, many of them are tedious and repetitive and are more an exercise in patience than of grammar.
I would recommend this book. I recommend reading through the entire book, then revising the content with a spaced repetition system, and to do some of the exercises but not to worry about completing them all. Instead, I'd recommend pairing this book with lots of German texts so you can see how it all works in real life. The context will help it stick in your mind far better than the exercises ever will.
Nevertheless, judging this book as a 'drill' book, I would not recommend it. Exercises are mostly composed of lists of very similar problems, in which the first 5 problems drive the point home, and the remaining 20 problems are almost exactly the same. This is not an efficient way to explain a point.
However, if you were to do 5 problems during one session, then another 5 on a different revision session, that might make it more useful.
I haven't completed all the exercises yet. However, many of them are tedious and repetitive and are more an exercise in patience than of grammar.
I would recommend this book. I recommend reading through the entire book, then revising the content with a spaced repetition system, and to do some of the exercises but not to worry about completing them all. Instead, I'd recommend pairing this book with lots of German texts so you can see how it all works in real life. The context will help it stick in your mind far better than the exercises ever will.
Nevertheless, judging this book as a 'drill' book, I would not recommend it. Exercises are mostly composed of lists of very similar problems, in which the first 5 problems drive the point home, and the remaining 20 problems are almost exactly the same. This is not an efficient way to explain a point.
However, if you were to do 5 problems during one session, then another 5 on a different revision session, that might make it more useful.
August 24, 2011
I feel like I know German better than this guy with all the typos and his sometimes scattered way of teaching the language. I don't recommended any of his workbooks, because they fail to help you bring all of your knowledge together in a concise manner so that you can easily understand what you're learning.
September 17, 2015
Ad usual, Ed Swick is awesome!
July 15, 2019
This is a solid supplement to other German books by Herr Swick from McGraw Hill. One will neither achieve nor maintain fluency with this book alone (unless they have prodigy-level retention skills), but if you're stateside and can only use German television shows/movies, etc. to bone up on your Deutsch (plus whatever Germans you actually know) this is a good tool to keep in one's box.
I'm not sure what goes into selecting the length of each exercise, or how they determine which facets of grammar should be emphasized. If I had to guess I would say students and teachers are polled and assessed for those areas where they're weakest, and the contents of workbooks are skewed toward that. The one-size-fits-all stuff doesn't work, naturally, for everyone. Certain exercises, for instance, dragged on for a couple of pages, while others were only two or three items long. The book has "drill" in its title, so I'm not complaining that the work is repetitive and sometimes close to drudgery (nobody likes doing sit-ups but a six-pack looks good), but I was still a little confused about why some exercises were long and others were short, especially when the ones on what I considered simple topics were long and ones I needed refreshing on were cursory.
Someone in a review of the more comprehensive "Complete German Grammar" noted that the editors/authors made a handful of mistakes in the answer key there. I didn't notice it in that book (which I rated 5 stars), but I did notice it here. That said, linguists disagree on certain points of grammar or diacritics, and believe it or not there are running orthographic disputes in the Germanistik field; the continued use of the "esset," for instance or "double S" thing that looks like this ("ß") is being debated by the Keepers of the Words (or whoever decides this in a post-Brothers Grimm/Martin Luther landscape).
It's possible that there are no mistakes in the book, and that I was merely taught different by my professors for reasons I either never knew or have forgotten. Anyway, recommended, and it might not be a bad idea to work one's way through this text once per year or so to stay fresh.
I'm not sure what goes into selecting the length of each exercise, or how they determine which facets of grammar should be emphasized. If I had to guess I would say students and teachers are polled and assessed for those areas where they're weakest, and the contents of workbooks are skewed toward that. The one-size-fits-all stuff doesn't work, naturally, for everyone. Certain exercises, for instance, dragged on for a couple of pages, while others were only two or three items long. The book has "drill" in its title, so I'm not complaining that the work is repetitive and sometimes close to drudgery (nobody likes doing sit-ups but a six-pack looks good), but I was still a little confused about why some exercises were long and others were short, especially when the ones on what I considered simple topics were long and ones I needed refreshing on were cursory.
Someone in a review of the more comprehensive "Complete German Grammar" noted that the editors/authors made a handful of mistakes in the answer key there. I didn't notice it in that book (which I rated 5 stars), but I did notice it here. That said, linguists disagree on certain points of grammar or diacritics, and believe it or not there are running orthographic disputes in the Germanistik field; the continued use of the "esset," for instance or "double S" thing that looks like this ("ß") is being debated by the Keepers of the Words (or whoever decides this in a post-Brothers Grimm/Martin Luther landscape).
It's possible that there are no mistakes in the book, and that I was merely taught different by my professors for reasons I either never knew or have forgotten. Anyway, recommended, and it might not be a bad idea to work one's way through this text once per year or so to stay fresh.
July 13, 2022
The Thoughts and Notes on Geman Grammar Drills..."Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going."
~Rita Mae Brown
Inspired and/or motivated by learning or iterating the German language, the book German Grammar Drills is the right book to do it.
Book is the manual and workbook permeated with numerous exercises for the complete experience of the offered knowledge in introductory explanation.
The areas covered in the German Grammar Drills...
1: Determining Gender
2: Forming Plurals
3: Pronouns
4: Nominative Case
5: Accusative Case
6: Dative Case
7: Genitive Case
8: Accusative - Dative Prepositions
9: Der Words and Ein Words
REVIEW No.1
10: Adjectives
11: Contractions
12: Questions and Interrogatives
13: Present Tense
14: Past Tense
15: Present Perfect and Past Perfect Tenses
16: Future Tenses
17: Imperatives
18: Reflexive Pronouns
REVIEW No.2
19: Prefixes
20: Numbers, Time, Days of the Week, and the Calender
21: Modal Auxiliaries and Double Infinitives
22: Conjunctions
23: Relative Pronouns
24: Comparatives and Superlatives
25: Passive Voice
26: Subjunctive Mood
27: Infinitive Clauses
REVIEW No.3
FINAL REVIEW...
Answer Key is included...
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart."
~Nelson Mandela
September 8, 2023
I think this is the generalized grammar book that beginners should start with. Really easy to comprehend. Good for up to the B1 level. Does not go very in-depth(as it shouldn't), but has enough to prepare someone for bigger and harder books. I wouldn't have been able to finish the over a-thousand-pages-long Hammer's German Grammar and Usage were it not for this and two other specialized grammar books in the drills series(Verbs & Sentence structure ones)
July 14, 2023
Ed Swick‘s German Grammar Drills is a great resource to pair with more conversational applications like Duolingo, Babbel or Mango. The book provides quite comprehensive explanations of major sentence structures and rules regarding noun genders and more! For intermediate German language learners, it‘s super easy to jump around and a perfect book for a quick refresher
November 22, 2018
I would give it a five if it made the answers more available.
November 13, 2014
In the intermediate pursuit of fluency in the German to English translation, we have to think grammar. Finally an answer to the problem of keeping the faith - and my eye-balls - without clawing them out! . ... . dwh -
November 13, 2015
Bought to help with my German lessons.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews