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The Rough Guide to German Dictionary Book
The Rough Guide to German Dictionary is the travel publisher’s answer to the traveller’s German problem: a combined phrasebook and dictionary in the Rough Guide style — direct, contemporary, and built for the road rather than the classroom.
One half gives the phrases of a trip in German with pronunciation help: greetings and getting around, food and drink, shopping, sightseeing, money, health, and trouble. The other half is a proper two-way dictionary for everything a trip throws up in between — signs, menus, forms, and the words other people say back.
It is written for independent travellers — the Rough Guide’s own tribe — backpackers, city-breakers, rail wanderers, and drivers crossing German-speaking Europe, who want one pocketable book that both speaks for them and translates for them, without a course attached.
Rough Guides built their name on telling travellers the truth plainly, and their language books keep the habit: the German here is the German of stations, counters, and cafés, kept current and colloquial, with the cultural notes a phrasebook usually skips — how ordering, tipping, queuing, and small talk actually work. The dictionary half is what extends the book’s life beyond phrase-hunting: sized for travel rather than scholarship, it covers the vocabulary of transport, accommodation, food, bodies, bureaucracy, and landscapes in both directions, so the traveller can decode as well as ask. Phrasebook and dictionary in one binding is an old idea that survives because trips need both, usually within the same minute — and because a book that will be opened fifty times a day should be built, as this one is, to be opened fifty times a day.
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About This Book
Travel publishers make language books for the trip itself, and the Rough Guide dictionary-phrasebook is a mature example of the breed: half phrasebook for speaking, half dictionary for understanding, in a format meant for pockets, daypacks, and café tables. For German-speaking Europe — where a traveller’s few phrases are warmly received and signs reward decoding — it is a complete linguistic toolkit in one small volume.
What Travellers Will Find
Phrases for the Journey
The phrase sections follow the trip: meeting people, transport and directions, sleeping and eating, shopping and sightseeing, money and communications, health and emergencies — German as it is needed, with pronunciation guidance written for non-speakers.
A Two-Way Travel Dictionary
English-to-German for what you need to say, German-to-English for what the world says back: menus, signs, tickets, forms, and announcements. Travel dictionaries earn their keep on the decoding side, and this one is stocked for the reading a trip demands.
The Rough Guide Extras
Cultural notes where language and custom meet — the etiquette of cafés and beer gardens, the forms of address, the directness that is politeness in German — plus the practical lists: numbers, times, dates, measurements, and the false friends that ambush English speakers.
Key Features
The combination is the feature: phrases and dictionary cross-referencing each other in one book, so nothing requires a second volume. The traveller-first editing is the second — vocabulary chosen by what trips actually contain, not by what dictionaries traditionally include.
Who This Book Is For
It is for independent travellers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, backpackers and interrailers, city-break tourists, road-trippers, and business travellers with weekends to spend — anyone whose German needs are real, immediate, and entirely practical.
How to Use This Book
Before the trip, read the phrase sections for the stages ahead and mark the twenty phrases you will certainly use. During the trip, let the dictionary half lead: decode every sign and menu you meet, and look words up in the moment — vocabulary learned at the scene of its use is remembered. Showing the book to your conversation partner is allowed and often enjoyed; phrasebooks are social objects.
Related Books
A phrasebook in the classic mould is German at a Glance. Full dialogues for longer exchanges are in the German Conversation Book.
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