Learn German With Stories: Café in Berlin - 10 Short Stories For Beginners (Dino lernt Deutsch - Simple German Short Stories For Beginners) (German Edition)

I was very impressed with this book! It introduced me to a very engaging way of learning German. The book is perfect for A1-A2 level, but though I have a B1 level, it helped me refresh many words I already knew and learn many new ones. The story is very interesting and engaging, which encourages the reader to continue reading and, consequently, learning. I highly recommend it to everyone wanting to level up their German proficiency.

I am extremely impressed with this collection. Through the 10 books the writer took me from almost zero German to a pretty good level of reading comprehension. The books follow a carefully graded progression in terms of vocabulary and grammatical patterns. Each book centers around a different city in Germany, and thus the reader learns the most salient features, cultural aspects and language peculiarities of places like Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, etc. Then there's the story line: Dino's adventures in each city are not only engaging but funny. As the reader reaches book 6, the language gets a bit more complex and the adventures also become, at least for this reader, more interesting. The chain of events slowly start introducing some more serious socio-political situations resulting from Germany’s past and present. Dino’s girlfriend, for example, works as a reporter in a refugee camp. They also help Fadiyah, a Syrian refugee make it from Sicily to Munich where her brother works. I also bought the 10 books read by the author. That proved to be invaluable help while learning how to pronounce what I was reading. I normally listen to the author’s reading while I drive. Some other readers have mentioned the glossary at the end of every chapter. That is a great time saver, but I have also been using the Google translator as extra help. Because I have written in between the lines the translation of all the new words, I recently decided to acquire the eBook version of the 10 books. That way I can read the stories without any translation and thus test my knowledge of the language I’m learning. An interesting grammar point. I have learned that the past tense in SPOKEN German is normally expressed as the Present Perfect in English. That is, instead of saying “I went there,” German speakers prefer to say “I have gone there” [Ich bin dort gegangen]. That trick worked for me very well. However, while reading Dino’s adventures I learned that in WRITTEN German, apparently the real past tense is most frequently used. So it was time for me to start learning all the past tense forms of all the verbs I knew. Until then I was happy to say: “Dino has eaten a Pizza,” [Dino hast eine Pizza gegessen] with these books I learned that in writing it’s more common to write: “Dino ate a Pizza.” [Dino aß eine Pizza]. I am lucky to have a friend who speaks very good German. With him I can discuss the stories and thus practice conversation. In short, This is an excellent way to learn German reading comprehension in a challenging and intelligent way. Very soon I’ll be ready to start Andre Klein’s next collection of stories.

I like how the book puts translations at the end of the chapter for the story. It helps me learn new words when a new word is inserted with a bunch of other words I already know. Some people complain about the stories being too short, but I like the shortness of the stories. I think it makes it easier to get through with some new knowledge and not have to take too much in at once. Each story is probably less than 10 paragraphs. There are only 10 stories in this book. I wouldn't mind seeing a few more stories in each one of these books. I noticed the person who gave this book 1 star was upset at how simple the stories. I personally like the simpleness, because I'm still getting started with German. They definitely aren't very funny or entertaining though as the book suggests. They basically read like this: I have a car. It goes fast. My roommate has a car. He drives slowly. So I can see the point of the 1 star reviewer, but I personally need a book with this simplicity for where my current learning level is.

My students love this. Easy to read and they learn different expression . You can find workbook for this book online

This book fit my needs perfectly. The stories are simple, but reasonably interesting. The vocabulary was generally down the middle of the fairway for my level of skill - which is hard to describe, but consists of a year of college German 40 years ago, a couple years of community ed spoken language classes 30 years ago and off-and-on self study, largely for reading comprehension purposes, the past few years. The text is in one sense "over-glossed" - more definitions are provided than I need (I needed maybe 10% of them). But I still found that helpful, partly as a matter of review of something I should have known or once knew and forgot, but also on the basis that my "10%" might be different that someone else's. I also liked what I thought to be a high proportion of idiomatic usages, or even slang, in a loose sense of the word, as a result of the stories being mostly dialogue and only a minority of narrative passages. New (glossed) words are with high frequency used in dialogues where you have a good probability of making a decent guess of the meaning (just we all did when first learning to read English). Also, the author appears to me to make good use of compound words where the components, or portions of them, might be familiar, but the combination takes a moment or a little bit of thought to sink in (an example for me, although not from this particular volume, is "Rastahaar" = dreads). I used the book coupled with a Kindle German dictionary and that also helped fill in the few gaps that I encountered. I also liked the relative brevity of the stories - there are 10 in the book and they are only a few pages long - providing an opportunity for multiple reads to help cement any new vocabulary without getting too bored or frustrated with slogging through a long story or passage. The author throws in a few facts of local geography, history, etc., just enough for flavoring but not turning it overly didactic. New words and phrases also re-pop up in later stories, sometimes glossed and sometimes not, but good for learning. I have now moved on to other books in this series and have similar positive experiences with them. For me, this series hits the Goldilocks standard - "just right". And the price is very modest.

This book is perfect for people that are learning german. It's really easy to read, most of it is present tense and you learn lots of vocabulary and idioms. At the end of each chapter there's an english translation of the highlighted words and phrases. The story is funny and entertaining. And if you buy the audio book too is amazing to practice your pronunciation.

This is really very good. I wasn't quite sure where to go next after beginning to learn basic German via "Dummies German All-In-One" and I thought it might be good to read some stories. I stumbled on this book by Google and the reviews seemed positive, so I downloaded it. To be honest, I was worried that I might not have enough German to be able to makes sense of whole pages of German text (daunting!). But it's written at just the right level and with a very helpful vocabulary at the end of each short chapter. Rather than being a chore, I enjoyed reading about Dino's life in Berlin. There's a humour in the text that made me want to read more and I found myself able to comprehend more and more as I read through it. The stories are short, but I think that's good at my level - each is a long enough read but not so long as to get bogged down in. As soon as I finished this book, I wanted to get the second one in order to keep on reading, which is in itself a pretty good recommendation. In short, thoroughly recommended!

This is really an excellent book for anyone looking to expand their German vocabulary. Each short story is full of phrases and specific words that are defined at the end of the chapter, which makes understanding the language a breeze. The stories are also funny and interesting, which makes it a real page turner. As difficult as the German language can be to learn, I found this book really helped me understand and appreciate the language to a whole new level.

C’est un bon livre si vous débutez en allemand. Phrases simples et faciles à comprendre. Cependant il faut qu’auparavant vous ayez les bases en allemand

Suddenly many words you studied come to life together and everything makes sense! Recommended for A2 level as the story is almost entirely told using the Präteritum tense.