In Regard to Languages....

One reason why people from non-English speaking country are actually quite good at speaking English is because they frequently watch and listen to the English language international news channels. In any language news are easier to understand than regular movies because the speakers use clear and easy language, don't apply any dialects or accents and you pretty much know what they're talking about anyway since we live in a globalized world. If you don't get Deutsche Welle TV thru your cable provider you can watch German language news online on e.g. www.n-tv.de (select videos).

You may want to look into a language immersion program. Check out this site for more info:
http://www.newpaltz.edu/lii

The BBC has a website called "BBC Languages" that has practice w spoken foreign tongues. Italian,Spanish,German and many others are available.
Free to use

Steve, from what I've been told it simply takes practice. It's great that you're doing the Pimsleur program, and people in Germany will appreciate that you can say a few things in their language. Reading and speaking are easier for many people; when reading you can linger over a sentence to figure it out, and when speaking you can pause until you've got the sentence in your mind. What you need next is practice in listening, where you can play a source over and over until you get it. This is why the recommendations of people to listen to internet radio or movies doesnt' really help, because you don't get the repetition you need to comprehend.

You might want to look into the Assimil program to go along with the Pimsleur. In the Assimil tapes they have short conversations that are intended to help you to speak, but you can use them to learn to listen and understand. They have the audio and an accompanying book that has the transcript, so you can read along until your ears can

cut-off response... Anyway, the idea is to listen to each passage until you can understand it without reading it in the book.

I listen to podcasts to help my ear "get used to" a new language. I listen to the news in French and also "One thing in a french day" podcasts. It only works when you know enough of the language for you to eventually be able to understand what they are saying. For example, I know about 80% of the words that they are saying. When I first started listening to the news, I could only catch a word here and there because they speak it so fast. After about two weeks, I can get the gist of most stories and understand almost all the words. Although news personalities speak fast, they do enunciate, which helps to learn the language.

I find that I have to take an actual language class that dissects the nuts and bolts of a language. I don't do well at all with those listening language programs. But if I can learn the structure of a language, its grammar, how they sound out the letters, etc., I can really "get it" much easier. Last fall I took a beginning Italian class at the local community college and it was so much fun. Yes, this takes more time, it can cost a couple hundred dollars (direct education tax deduction, though!) but I find it's really worth it.

Foreign news radio broadcasts can be downloaded (I do this in French from www.rfi.fr; also "Google" Francais Facile for the news spoken more slowly and using most common words) and replayed over and over. I download 5-6 20 minute broadcasts at a time to a jumpdrive and then playback through whatever computer is handy. Perfect for Ipod-type, too. Each repetition I find that I am anticipating and also picking up more words. These broadcasts are regional or world news so the material is timely and familiar. As mentioned above, BBC has a lot of on-line free resources. Undoubtedly there are similar programs available in the German (Italian, Spanish, Greek ...) world also

Bob