What You’ll LearnIn the first 10 lessons, you’ll cover the basics: saying hello, asking for or giving information, scheduling a meal or a meeting, asking for or giving basic directions, and much more. You’ll be able to handle minimum courtesy requirements, understand much of what you hear, and be understood at a beginning level, but with near-native pronunciation skills.

In the next 10 lessons, you’ll build on what you’ve learned. Expand your menu, increase your scheduling abilities from general to specific, start to deal with currency and exchanging money, refine your conversations and add over a hundred new vocabulary items. You’ll understand more of what you hear, and be able to participate with speech that is smoother and more confident.

In the final 10 lessons, you’ll be speaking and understanding at an intermediate level. More directions are given in German, which moves your learning to a whole new plane. Lessons include shopping, visiting friends, going to a restaurant, plans for the evening, car trips, and talking about family. You’ll be able to speak comfortably about things that happened in the past and make plans for the future.

Reading Lessons begin in Lesson 10 to provide you with an introduction to reading German. In addition, the combined Reading Lessons are included after Lesson 30. These Reading Lessons, which total about one hour, are designed to teach you to sound out words with correct pronunciation and accent.

Learning the sound of each letter alone and in culturally distinct combinations allows your brain to process what you’re hearing in the audio lessons from a new and different perspective. It’s a powerful combination that makes Pimsleur different from every other method on the market.

The German LanguageGerman is the official language of Germany and Austria and is one of the official languages of Switzerland. It is also an official language in Belgium, Lichtenstein, and Luxembourg. Nearly 100 million people speak German as their first language: about 77 million in Germany, 8 million in Austria, and 4.5 million in Switzerland.