Learn in your Car - German - Level One <
Brand New (still shrink wrapped) - 3 CDs and Book
3 Hours of Audio and a Listening Guide
-New edition completely revised and updated for the 21st Century
-Self paced interactive format lets you take the lead and set your own progress
-The learn in your car system is a simple, effective method to learn to communicate quickly and easily in another language. Level One focuses on essential travel needs, while Level Two andThree provide more everyday conversation as well as more comprehensive grammar and vocabulary skills.
From The Publishers:
Our best-selling audio language-learning program provides comprehensive grammar and vocabulary to beginners and advanced students, offering guidance in pronunciation in addition to language fundamentals. Updated for the 21st century and re-recorded with fresh voiceovers, Learn In Your Car includes terminology for cell phones, computers and the Internet, as well as contemporary currencies and usages. Listeners learn pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar of a new language without the need of a textbook: Level 1: Key words and phrases, basic grammar skills, emphasizes travel needs; Level 2: Expands vocabulary, new grammar concepts, more day-to-day activities; Level 3: Broadens vocabulary base, more advanced grammar skills, enriches conversational ability. 3 hours of audio on 3 compact discs, 1 Listening Guide with recorded text for reference and grammar notes.
3 Hours of Comprehensive Audio Instruction plus a Full Text Listening Guide for Reference.
About the Language
German is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. German is related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 100 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers. German is the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union and is generally considered as a global language. Standard German is widely taught in schools, universities, and Goethe Institutes worldwide.
German is spoken primarily in Germany (first language for more than 95% of the population), Austria (89%) and Switzerland (64%) together with Liechtenstein, Luxembourg (D-A-CH-Li-Lux) constituting the countries where German is the majority language.
Other European German-speaking communities are found in Italy (Bolzano-Bozen), in the East Cantons of Belgium, in the French area Alsace which often was traded between Germany and France in history and in some border villages of the former South Jutland County (in German, Nordschleswig, in Danish, Sønderjylland) of Denmark.
Some German-speaking communities still survive in parts of Romania, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and above all Russia and Kazakhstan, although forced expulsions after World War II and massive emigration to Germany in the 1980s and 1990s have depopulated most of these communities. It is also spoken by German-speaking foreign populations and some of their descendants in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Siberia in Russia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia).
A considerable proportion of the native population speak German dialects in Luxembourg and the surrounding areas. Some people also master standard German (especially in Luxembourg), although in the French regions of Alsace (German: Elsass) and Lorraine (German: Lothringen) French has replaced the local German dialects as the official language, even though it has not been fully replaced on the street.
Outside of Europe and the former Soviet Union, the largest German-speaking communities are to be found in the United States, Canada, Brazil and in Argentina where millions of Germans migrated in the last 200 years; but the vast majority of their descendants no longer speak German. Additionally, German-speaking communities can be found in the former German colony of Namibia independent from South Africa since 1990, as well as in the other countries of German emigration such as Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Venezuela (where Alemán Coloniero developed), South Africa and Australia.
Standard German originated not as a traditional dialect of a specific region, but as a written language. However, there are places where the traditional regional dialects have been replaced by standard German; this is the case in vast stretches of Northern Germany, but also in major cities in other parts of the country.
Standard German differs regionally, between German-speaking countries, in vocabulary and some instances of pronunciation, and even grammar and orthography. This variation must not be confused with the variation of local dialects. Even though the regional varieties of standard German are only to a certain degree influenced by the local dialects, they are very distinct. German is thus considered a pluricentric language.
In most regions, the speakers use a continuum of mixtures from more dialectal varieties to more standard varieties according to situation.
In the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, mixtures of dialect and standard are very seldom used, and the use of standard German is largely restricted to the written language. Therefore, this situation has been called a medial diglossia. Swiss Standard German is used in the Swiss education system.
Standard German is the only official language in Liechtenstein and Austria; it shares official status in Germany (with Danish, Frisian and Sorbian as minority languages), Switzerland (with French, Italian and Romansh), Belgium (with Dutch and French) and Luxembourg (with French and Luxembourgish). It is used as a local official language in Italy (Province of Bolzano-Bozen), as well as in the cities of Sopron (Hungary), Krahule (Slovakia) and several cities in Romania. It is the official language (with Italian) of the Vatican Swiss Guard.
German has an officially recognized status as regional or auxiliary language in Denmark (South Jutland region), France (Alsace and Moselle regions), Italy (Gressoney valley), Namibia, Poland (Opole region), and Russia (Asowo and Halbstadt).
German is one of the 23 official languages of the European Union. It is the language with the largest number of native speakers in the European Union, and, just behind English and ahead of French, the second-most spoken language in Europe.
German is the third most taught foreign language in the English speaking world after French and Spanish.
German is the main language of about 9095 million people in Europe (as of 2004), or 13.3% of all Europeans, being the second most spoken native language in Europe after Russian, above French (66.5 million speakers in 2004) and English (64.2 million speakers in 2004). It is therefore the most spoken first language in the EU. It is the second most known foreign language in the EU. It is one of the official languages of the European Union, and one of the three working languages of the European Commission, along with English and French. Thirty-two percent of citizens of the EU-15 countries say they can converse in German (either as a mother tongue or as a second or foreign language). This is assisted by the widespread availability of German TV by cable or satellite.
German was once, and still remains to some extent, a lingua franca in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe.
According to Global Reach (2004), 6.9% of the Internet population is German. According to Netz-tipp (2002), 7.7% of webpages are written in German, making it second only to English in the European language group. They also report that 12% of Google's users use its German interface.
Older statistics: Babel (1998) found somewhat similar demographics. FUNREDES (1998) and Vilaweb (2000) both found that German is the third most popular language used by websites, after English and Japanese.
German is a member of the western branch of the Germanic family of languages, which in turn is part of the Indo-European language family. The German dialect continuum is traditionally divided most broadly into High German and Low German.
Distribution of the native speakers of major continental West-Germanic dialectal varieties.
The variation among the German dialects is considerable, with only the neighbouring dialects being mutually intelligible. Some dialects are not intelligible to people who only know standard German. However, all German dialects belong to the dialect continuum of High German and Low Saxon languages. Until roughly the end of the Second World War, there was a dialect continuum of all the continental West Germanic languages because nearly any pair of neighbouring dialects were perfectly mutually intelligible.
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