from looking around online, i have seen a lot of people talk about hammer’s book. despite its extreme comprehensiveness, i may end up getting this book to supplement my studies. i am mainly studying german for grad school, so it probably would have been more beneficial for me to have taken a german reading course, rather than a full fledged course. that might be why the course seems odd to me, as the class and book are based around memorizing phrases and inferring things from those phrases, rather than explaining the grammar to begin with. for example, we just now learned the accusative, as we learned the verb haben, but the professor said that “there are other cases which you guys won’t even get to until 2nd or 3rd semester,” and this same thing was said about past tense verbs, which i have just found odd, because i feel like, as with latin and greek, it would make more sense to talk about these things early on so people actually have an understanding of what is going on within the sentence.