Basic German, Audio CD Language Course, Volume 1.

Foreign Service Institute (FSI). Includes 11 audio CD discs ( = 9? hours), plus a 171-page textbook. Our customers have found that learning German from this FSI (Foreign Service Institute) course is surprisingly easy. It also requires less time than you may ever have thought possible__as little as 25 minutes a day in most cases, or less than 60 than hours total, unless you're linguistically challenged as I am, in which case there is no hope. After going through each lesson once with the book, you can then practice exclusively with the cassettes while doing something else, such as driving, jogging, cooking, etc, but hopefully not all at the same time. You learn from this course by listening and repeating, and repeating again__basically the same way you learned to speak English, until you're ready to throw up. The cassette player becomes your "tireless tutor", and it will repeat the same phrase again and again until you have mastered the expression or start taking Prozac, whichever comes first. You proceed at your own pace and at your own convenience. Native German voices, clearly recorded on the audio CD discs, provide you with models of correct pronunciation. Each lesson in Volume 1 begins with a presentation of new sounds and structures to be featured in that unit. This is followed by a dialog presented in a sentence-by-sentence "build-up" that makes it easy to understand and pronounce correctly all the sentences of the dialog. An application section provides exercises on the grammatical features introduced in the dialog. In addition, there are identification exercises requiring English responses to the German dialog, to check your understanding. Each lesson mercifully concludes with a participation exercise in which you_the learner_assume a role in the dialog you have just learned. This exercise simulates live interaction with your "tireless teacher," on the cassette, who speaks the dialog assigned to the other participant in the role situation. Brief culture capsules in English are an added feature of the course. They follow each lesson unit and provide insight into some German customs, beer drinking, and language usage. This is the big daddy of German language courses!