It seems that, as teachers, we are forever trying to find the perfect textbook for our classes. At my
school, the most recent entry in the quest for the perfect textbook has been DEUTSCH HEUTE (9th ed.),
which we started using at the beginning of this semester. By now, we have made our way through the first
three
chapters and I think I'm in a position to give a preliminary review of this textbook.
The Good: There is a lot of audio available on the textbook CD, which helps with
listening comprehension and pronunciation; each chapter is followed by a
"Wiederholung" section and a summary of the grammar concepts for the chapter;
each chapter features several brief cultural reading texts in English; different
language skills (reading, listening, grammar) are well balanced in each chapter;
the vocab flashcards on the publisher's website are very useful.
The Bad: I feel that the grammar sections are really choppy with a lot of small grammar issues that
subsequently are not even addressed on the chapter tests that go with the book; the vocabulary is broken
up into two sections, which I feel detracts from the continuity of the chapter; the grammar charts within
the chapters are woefully inadequate, although they are more usefully presented in the grammar summary
at the end of each chapter; the amount of material covered in each chapter is not well-balanced and
sometimes overwhelming. For example, chapter 3 introduces the accusative (definite and indefinite
articles, possessive pronouns, personal pronouns, and prepositions), which makes sense, but then it
also throws in tiny units on the imperative, time-place word order, "wissen" and "kennen", masculine
N-nouns, units of measurement, the conjugation of three irregular verbs, and compound nouns. I think
that dealing with the accusative case in its entirety would have been quite enough for one chapter.
The Ugly: The practice exercises are completely inadequate. For each of the many small units of grammar
covered in each chapter, there is usually only one brief exercise, which often is not even helpful to the
students. The section dealing with masculine n-nouns, for instance, is followed by one fill-in-the-blank
exercise with ten blanks. Six of the ten blanks, however, call for the n-noun to be used in the nominative,
which does not do much for practicing the concept. If you expect that the student activities manual will
provide additional practice, you may be disappointed as well. Although each chapter contains about eight
pages of exercises, they are too complex and complicated to truly allow students to practice the concepts.
For example, instead of focusing a specific practice exercise on one thing, such as accusative pronouns,
the exercises often combine a number of issues (such as accusative pronouns, definite and indefinite
articles as well as possessive pronouns) into one exercise. As a result, the exercises don't really help the
students to master one concept at a time. The textbook tests, on the other hand, are almost insultingly
simple at times and either gloss over much of the material covered in the chapter or don't include it at all.
The Low-Down: Deutsch Heute is not among my favorite textbooks, although it does have some
interesting features. If you are planning on using it in your classroom, you had better be prepared to come
up with a lot of additional practice exercises on your own (or maybe find some on this site).
audio flashcards (9th ed.).