Sonja Çeven

I've now completed the first section of Learn German for Beginners: An Immersive Language Journey A1+, and I have mixed feelings about it. The material that is actually taught is generally very good. The explanations are clear, the instructor is engaging, and I've learned a lot about things such as sentence structure, verb conjugation, modal verbs, articles and the accusative case. When a topic is properly introduced and explained, I've found the course genuinely useful. My issue is with the progression and particularly the exercises. For a course marketed towards beginners, the exercises frequently seem to assume knowledge that hasn't actually been taught yet. You can go from very basic material such as greetings and introductory German to an exercise whose solution suddenly discusses ordinal numbers, adjective declension, compound nouns, the dative case, subordinate clauses and separable verbs — despite some of those concepts not having been properly introduced beforehand. This makes the difficulty feel less like a natural progression and more like there are lessons missing between topics. At times it feels almost like watching a highlight reel of a complete German course rather than the complete course itself: the important pieces are there, but some of the steps connecting them seem to be absent. That's particularly frustrating in exercises, because getting an answer wrong isn't always an indication that you haven't understood what you've been taught. Sometimes you're simply being tested on vocabulary or grammar that you haven't been given yet. The subsequent explanation may tell you why the answer works, but that's rather late to introduce a grammatical concept that the exercise has already expected you to use. I am enjoying the course and intend to continue with it, because there is genuinely good teaching here. However, I think it would be considerably stronger if the exercises were restricted to material already taught, with new grammatical concepts properly introduced in their own lessons before students are expected to recognise or use them. For something explicitly called “Learn German for Beginners”, the assumed knowledge can sometimes feel surprisingly far removed from beginner level.
- Review by Berian Lowe on Learn German for Beginners:An Immersive Language Journey A1+