You could always give a shot to french's Subjonctif-plus-que-parfait tense. That's fun!

JP

not familiar with that...but since its a romance language im assuming its like the tables and tables of tenses i had to learn for latin verbs...talk about painful!

Gaah!!!

Just had a painful flashback to high school... I hated that tense with a passion, and I always got it wrong.

Re the references to Latin... if your first language is Chinese or Hungarian or Finnish, then knowing Latin will make learning German easier because both Latin and German are of the Indo-European language family, and having learnt one Indo-European language makes it easier to learn the next one. However, if your first language is English then Latin won't help that much because German and English are much more closely related than German and Latin. But... knowing Latin will still help in a small way because you will already be familiar with the concept of case endings.

And a general comment about learning German... I've once heard it said (possibly by my other half) that German is one of the easiest languages to learn to speak badly but one of the most difficult languages to learn to speak well. And while I can't comment on that from my own experience (as I grew up in Germany) I think this is probably right.

What makes German difficult is the fact that you have genders and cases. For example, tables are masculine, and depending on context "the table" can be either "der Tisch", "des Tisches", "dem Tisch" or "den Tisch". However... people are still going to understand you if you get the article wrong, and even if you say "die Tisch" (feminine) or "das Tisch" (neuter) they will still know that you are talking about a table... and if you're speaking with a foreign accent they won't even notice the fact that you got the article wrong because they are used to people with foreign accents getting the article wrong!

So... my advice for someone learning German for social purposes: Learn the words - learn how to string them together - but don't get too hung up on the finer points of grammar. The important thing is to be able to communicate, and learning how to communicate in German is - allegedly - quite easy.

Couldn't agree more...I may butcher the German language, but it is still understandable.

OP-Surf around on German language websites, such as Lufthansa's. You'll see a lot of familiar words and how the sentences are structured.

Actually, both German and Latin are "Indo-Germanic" languages. Indo-Germanic is a synonym for Indo-European. (http://m-w.com/dictionary/indo-germanic) The term is used, in most circles, much less frequently than Indo-European. Basically, what being in the same big language group means is that linguists believe that the Germanic and Romance languages are among those languages that had their origins in a common language (the re-constructed (i.e., hypothetical/guessed) language, Proto-Indo-European).

German (and English, Dutch, Swedish, etc.) are Germanic languages, while Latin (and French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.) are Latin or Romance languages. Here's a somewhat-simplified schema of many of the Indo-European languages: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.html

Back to the OP...
If you can get your company to pay for classes or a live tutor, I think you'll find that to be more helpful than books/tapes. However, pretty much anything will help you to some extent, and anything is simply going to take time for your skills to build. But don't get discouraged and keep at it!

Why is this thread making me think of those Wall Street language institute posters that are all over the Muenchen U-Bahn stations...

Andergraund --- That's falsch!

Who said English is easy to learn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zkZ3f8DnKs

Wall street institute to teach ENGLISH? How odd. If anything, you'd think they'd be teaching Finance!

JP

that's great...surprisingly i think i got my "z"s and my "ch"'s down...of course a german might think differently

I took some German at the local university (although 3 hours at night after work is painful).

My boyfriend who is from Vienna (although if he had his chose I'd take Viennese German instead of German ), downloaded the "Tell Me More" German program which is less expensive than Rosetta Stone, but the navigation isn't too great.

I would recommend taking classes so you're put on the spot about the grammar and forced to write sentences, etc. The post someone wrote about conversing over Skype with a tutor is a great idea or even find a pen pal online that wants to learn English. Luckily for me I'm exposed to it all the time with boyfriend's family-although I have to admit it's embarrassing to attempt to speak.

In parallel with classes I use a program called Linkword. It's not a good interface, but it's excellent in building vocabulary. It uses "links" to help you remember like "the lobster has a sense of humor", "der hummer". I've found it helpful and it's pretty affordable.

http://www.linkwordlanguages.com/german.htm

I even bought some children stories on amazon in German, Der kleine Prinz is cute. You can also buy short stories in English and German and supplement with those as well.

Viel Spass!

One thing I did while I was learning Spanish was to read the early Harry Potter novels (the ones which were actually still suitable for younger children) in their Spanish translations (I had read the English versions earlier). It will give you some vocabulary you're never going to need (witch, wizard, and the like), but at least it's a fairly simple way to get the hang of sentence structure and things along those lines. And you'll roughly know what's going on already if you've read the books in English, which can be a big help.

for anyone else following this thread i found this site to be very helpful as well:
www.dict.cc

I use these as well:

http://www.orbeon.com/ops/xforms-translate/

http://www.verbformen.com/index.jsp

Or (if you can stand this) watch a movie that you know by heart in German, with the German subtitles showing.

This is hard to do, though.