Today I'm going to do a mini-review of the differences between the 1987 edition of German with Ease that I learnt German with and the most recent edition (2014). I'll try to be unbiased, though that will be hard as I certainly credit the 1987 edition of the book + CDs with much of my success in passing the German B2 exam. It was pretty much my only source of grammar, and I ended up with an intuitive feel for the grammar that no other course of approach ever has. I'm pretty confident the new edition (2014) could do the same so don't take this comparison as any sort of advice against buying the new edition. I really just want to discuss some of the points of difference that I've noticed.
The idea of the lessons is that they are short, so you can do one a day (although, due to my desire to mimic the whole dialogue as closely as possible, I didn't keep to this timetable as the lessons got harder and longer) and they are usually funny, even if just in a very simple way. It's not Seinfeld, but you'll get a giggle to help cement your understanding and to make it easier to listen to the lesson on repeat many times as I did. Despite listening and repeating many times, I essentially never did the exercises. I just listened to those sentences as well, and repeated. I would read the English whenever I needed to to make sure I was understanding 100% so as to capture nuance as well. One thing that I actually considered to be a great advantage of the method was that it doesn't try to give you tourist-centric dialogues that you can use "from day one". All the other millions of copycat courses do that, and poorly to boot. You will NOT be able to use phrases right from the start if the language is unfamiliar to you. You may say something useful, but you won't understand the replies, so why focus on that? Instead, Assimil builds the intuitive skills needed for comprehension of spoken language, the hardest skill of all.
Since I only have access to chapters 1, 50 and 100 from the 2014 sample linked above, I will just compare those with the same lessons in the 1987 edition and see how they stack up.
Lesson 1
The 1987 has a funny little dialogue at a cafe, but it's definitely not your usual first dialogue in a language course. The customer complains about his tea being cold. The waiter apologises and brings him a new cup, which the customer now likes. Too much it seems as he then complains about the cup being too small! 9 lines and 19 new words.
In the 2014 edition the first lesson is entitled "Good luck" and says that today's a special day because you're starting to learn German. Humour is subjective, but this one is definitely not funny. 5 lines and 14 new words.
Lesson 50
The 1987 edition's 50th lesson is entitled "Being a shop assistant isn't easy". A man goes into a store and gets help picking something for his mother. Not particularly funny but reading it now it is familiar to me. 13 lines and 153 words.
The 2014 edition "Advertisements for Holiday Apartments", in which a couple discuss a possible holiday in Spain. The ad piques the wife's interest by describing its location and reassuring its German audience that the Spanish can speak English. The husband agrees that it sounds good but they don't mention money and, besides, he'd like to go Spain to learn Spanish. OK, so, again, not Seinfeld, but this one is funnier than its 1987 counterpart. 10 lines and 76 words.
Lesson 100
The 1987 editions 100th lesson is called "Don't trust anybody". It is about a reader of the book talking to someone they've just met (it seems) about how sad they are that their German book ("German with Ease") has now finished and how they were looking forward to every day. Their interlocutor is intrigued by someone having such a strong reaction to a book and takes a look and flicks through it. He realises he can understand a little with his school German and finds the pictures funny and so ends up just taking off with the book, leaving its original owner distraught. Silly? Yes, but silly in a funny way and memorable because of it. 15 long lines.
The 2014 edition's lesson 100 is a long email to an old friend telling the story of how she met her now partner. The story is a bit funny too. I think it's sort of memorable, and I think it's a good idea to include at least one informal letter in the book (the 1987 has one at lesson 99). It consists of 16 long lines.
The final complexity between these two lessons is probably pretty similar, although the 1987 edition uses more of the little particles that can be so tricky for learners to master, like "nun", "mal", etc. I can't imagine the transition to that complexity is as smooth in the 2014 edition though because the lessons I've seen from the sample seem so much shorter and simpler. I suspect a reader wouldn't end up as confident of the grammar, etc, and would have a smaller vocab purely because they had been exposed (seemingly, from this admittedly small sample) to much less of the language. And yet, the 2014 book's last lesson ends on page 508 vs the 1987 edition's 386 pages. This is something I've mentioned before - the new books have a format that doesn't fit easily into a pocket, unlike the older format with the very handy red string bookmark built in. All the older editions I've seen of a similar vintage have the same robust cover, whilst the newer editions (one of which I own) tend to be much larger, but with lots of wasted space and padding out and, it seems, possibly even less content overall, and, in language learning, content is king. Sometimes they expand the number of exercises, which I see no value in at all. They're just a way for a beginner to feel like they're not doing well and they go against the principle of assimilation for which the method is rightly famous.
I'm pretty sure I've written about this change to a cheaper but bulkier format before so I won't dwell on it here.
My summary is that I feel like the course has been simplified in being "updated". It's still probably the best method available on the market to get a solo learner to the stage of being able to have conversations and access native content (and then getting one's listening up to native speed). I really didn't study any grammar or do any grammar exercises before completing the B2 exam, so I have to concur that the 1987 edition at least did deliver on its promise of getting me to a B2 level, sort of. Certainly in terms of grammar. I still needed to learn a lot of words and work on some writing skills, but I'd say that Assimil + learning words from appropriate content + speaking with native speakers regularly is enough to pass the B2 exam. I suspect that's still true with the 2014 edition.
What are you experiences with either edition? Let me know in the comments!
