Beginner's Dutch

I like the step by step approach. Because of this, I also bought "Teach yourself French"

I have been working with this book for a month now and have found it to be an excellent book for the begining student. I can only guess that the older 1-star reviews were working from a different book. I agree with the comments that the CD's are required. While Dutch pronunciation is regular (that is, spelling and sounds correspond fairly well), getting the exact prounciation and intonation is hard without hearing native speakers. The speakers on the CD's are slower than normal conversation speed, whihc is nice for the beginner. They could speed up a bit in later chapters, and do in the few exercises that portray more colloquial langauge. As it is a beginners book, it doesn't bog one down in minutiae, but this can also be a bit frustrating. In the part about going to the market, only a few food terms are given - no copete list is provided. But as Ducth pronunciation is regular, you could get a phrase book, whihc often give long lists, to supplement this book. This book teaches basic grammar, enough to get started. It gives the present and future tenses, but only a few examples of the past, and no explanations of past tense formation (just scattered vocab items when required by the context of a dialog). I personally wasn't looking to learn Ducth intensively, but I'm guessing, if you want a more complete package, the regular Teach Yourself Dutch (not beginner's) would be more to your liking. They also publish a Teach Yourself Dutch Grammar.

For someone relatively experienced at learning new languages, 'Beginner's Dutch' is both very helpful and slightly frustrating. On the one hand, the book is lucid and its explanations concise and free of jargon. Further, I found the writing style of the authors to be fluid and engaging. On the other hand, the authors tend to spoon feed the mechanics of Dutch grammar to the reader (admittedly, less a problem for some than others). Also, the book's small dictionary leaves a lot to be desired. In sum, Beginner's Dutch seems to be a very useful learning tool, but remember to buy a dictionary to supplement your studies (and finding a decent, reasonably-priced Dutch-English dictionary is an entirely different matter). -CS