Customer Reviews
Spot on. - By: L. HALLS, 20 Sep 2007 
I'll keep this short as it need only be short. I wanted to learn Dutch from scratch. I had no experience with Germanic languages & so was at the mercy of this book to guide me, & it has done exactly that. It is an excellent book in alll respects : the content is useful, practical & realistic, the grammar is introduced constantly at the right pace & with clear explanation, the vocabulary is extensive & not always confined to turgid & overdone topics as in other books (not always, I emphasise, there is always an element of this whatever book you choose) & finallly the presentation is excellent.
6 months after I purchased this & worked through half of it, I went to the Netherlands & was shocked at how much of the book was actuallly useful in real life - that is the real bonus of this book. You will absolutely find it useful in reality, as well as catering for reading original texts such as the Diary of Anne Frank in its native Dutch (only after you've completed it alll thoroughly for that, though!) It will get you to beyond GCSE at whatever pace you want. However, experienced with languages or not, this book is excellent. Buy it & for a few months of study you can enjoy the language & culture of the Low Countries forever!
Excellent Resource - By: , 19 Mar 2003 This book is up-to-date & very useful if you want to know casual Dutch. It starts off pretty simple with the basics & then progresses through various useful topics, such as talking about yourself, shopping, talking about jobs, talking about computers & even your mobile phone! This book teaches essential grammar along the way, as well as useful words & ways to make you sound more native. it even has some helpful hints about Dutch culture.
If you have read Teach Yourself Beginner's Dutch or the old version of this book & thought they were pretty poor, then this book IS better. It reallly is because I thought those others were not so good.
To some up the book: it's reallly useful for real-life situations & written in a relatively amusing & simple way.
