****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
The printing is glossy and high quality. The pages are not as thick as the thickest board-books, but seem plenty durable.The illustrations are excellent, with simple details, and vivid, realistic colors. 4-5 items are shown separately on the left hand, and then they are shown in context, in a room, on the right hand side. I really like this approach. To me, this is very developmentally sound for children just learning to talk, and helps them relate the separate objects to similar contexts in their own lives.I love it that a typical "European" kitchen, bathroom and bedroom are depicted. Even the radiator along the wall is present, rather than the more typical American vents. There are other little things that are culturally accurate to europe, which I find very cool. It means that the publisher actually made the book based on things European children would see, rather than just trying to cram vocab onto the same pictures used for 28 other languages.My rating of this book is in contrast to many other books I've come across in the past. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, when I ordered this, but I'm very pleased. Here's why:It seems like sometimes with German language books for kids, the images are old-fashioned, just plain bad/boring, or worse, developmentally inappropriate for very young children. For example, I have seen "My first [fill in the blank] vocabulary" books, with pictures of things that are RIDICULOUS for a child just learning to talk/read... Either the items (or the words for the items) are much too complex, or they are things that are simply extraneous to the life of a toddler.That is not the case with this book.In the interest of full disclosure, I am a German teacher, and I have a lot of frustration with publishers who try to use boring, outdated images in edition after edition, as is the case with the textbook my district uses. The "new" edition, published in 2006, still contains most of the original pictures from the 1970s edition. Not cool, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. This is another reason why this book series is like a breath of fresh air for me.
