Language Book Pet Peeves

I am somewhat forgiving of typos and such in ordinary books, because most of the time they don't really matter. You can understand what was intended and move on.

In language instruction books, this is not the case. Mistakes are almost unforgivable. I was quite mad at Beginner's Finnish for a while because it would pull many of the ordinary, despicable stunts - using a word in a dialogue or an exercise chapter before it was taught to you, misspelling words in vocab lists, (do they not realize that you learn words from those?) etc. In that case I was especially mad because I felt like they had neglected to proofread properly because they knew how few alternatives there were on the market.

And for the same reason, I cannot find quite the same amount of rage for my Japanese book, although it sports many examples of those same errors. I know I have other options. I bought this book, I had a choice. But I can still rant a bit, right?

Chapter Three's title is, "Talking about Family". And, okay, so you do learn enough about ages, family member names, and gender terms to have a limited discussion on that topic. But the chapter also includes a lot about months and clock time. But aside from the annoyance of a title that expresses, at best, half of it's contents, I want to rant a bit about exercise 3.7

They want you to 'ask' about the business hours of a bunch of random businesses, and then 'answer'. Okay, so we did learn time expressions. But we hadn't learned the names for any of the businesses, nor any expression that would even approach how to ask for business hours! After a second of staring at it, horrified that I had missed a rather meaty section of vocabulary from earlier on, I see another box, below the exercise, reading, "Some extra vocabulary that you may find helpful for this exercise".

No, no, no. These boxes are a great idea.... sometimes. Like when you're asking them to talk about their hobbies and you include a box with some extra hobbies that may apply in their unique cases. But not when the WHOLE exercise hinges on words only introduced FOR the exercise!

Grrr....