Teach Me German: A Musical Journey Through the Day

by Judy Mahoney

- Children ages 2-12 learn languages with ease and humor using this innovative book and audio set.- Teaches numbers, the alphabet, days of the week, everyday phrases, and more - Songs include: The More We Get Together; Hush Little Baby; Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes; and more - Audio features familiar tunes sung by native children accompanied by professional musicians.- Delightfully illustrated 20-page book suitable for coloring includes all song lyrics and translations.

20 pages, Paperback + Audio CD

First published December 1, 1986

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars, rounded up. A nice idea, but the execution was disappointing. I like the idea of learning a language through song: lyrics are easy to pick up, and complicated ideas like syntax and grammar are made all the more natural through this type of learning. However, this book doesn’t really do that. It doesn’t have traditional German songs, for one thing; it has traditional English songs that have been translated into German. It also doesn’t give the English meaning for the German words; it simply gives the original English words. As you can probably imagine, since the songs all have the same rhyme and meter patterns as their English counterparts, the translation isn’t exact, and without knowing what any of these words actually means, it’s going to be impossible for children coming to German for the first time to understand much at all of this. It’s going to be more like singing nonsense syllables than singing something with meaning. It’s also a waste of a rich musical heritage, as there are a great many traditional German-language songs for children that might have been fun. Perhaps my biggest disappointment was that the book’s back cover specifically mentions “The More We Get Together”, which is, of course, the anglophone’s counterpart to the traditional song “Ach du lieber Augustin.” I don’t know all of the words in German—only a little bit. My mother used to sing it to me when I was a kid in a mix of German and English, “Ach du lieber Augustin, everything’s gone.” I have, of course, looked up the German lyrics as a grownup, but I was looking forward to a book + CD combo. Instead, I got the completely unrelated English version, translated into the language of the original song, but with none of the same content.

Still, there is some good here. I like the coloring book pages, which will give the kids something to do while they listen to the German language, and which will also let them spend time looking at a page with German words. I liked that the songs aren’t the whole story; there are simple sentences in German, too, which provide a great opportunity for learning words, phrases, and basic grammar. Certainly not bad, but it could have been so much more.