Well, it’s not really my favorite book, but it’s definitely up there. I’m talking, of course, about Menschen A2.1 Kursbuch und Arbeitsbuch. These are the two books we’ve been using for our A2.1 course and it has been fantastically helpful with my German education.

My favorite thing about the book is that the chapters are condensed and meant to be covered in about a day or two. It doesn’t focus too much on vocab, which is good because I feel like learning vocab is usually the easier part of learning a language. Each chapter covers one topic, like eating at a restaurant, going grocery shopping, or cooking food (you can tell that I’m very interested in eating). Learning phrases and words in a context makes them easier to remember. This allows your brain to sort the topics easily and if I need to I can look back in the book and brush up on something before I know I will need it.

Central to passing A2 German is a heavy focus on grammar. This is unfortunate, because German grammar is notoriously difficult (at least to me), but the book makes it straight forward and easy to practice different grammatical concepts so that you get better as using them on the fly in normal conversation.

Overall, I found the A2.1 Kursbuch and Arbeitsbuch to be an invaluable part of my German education and I am sure I will continue to refer back to it in the future to brush up on certain concepts. Best of all, the books were relatively affordable, certainly compared to some of the books I have had to purchase before for university!