Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Schmidt!

We're taking a trip to Austria with Mike's parents in a couple of months, in part to visit Geo's ancestral homeland. (Her father emigrated from the Burgenland area, the part of Austria right by the border with Hungary.) Since we're going to be (hopefully) spending some time in smaller towns, we thought it might be nice to learn even a little bit of conversational German. Fortunately, our public library had some downloadable "learn German" books on tape. The one we got is a twelve-hour course (the Pimsleur course, in case you care), and apparently the idea is that you do a half-hour lesson each day.

It seems pretty good so far -- they spend a lot of time on pronunciation and have you repeat things back quite a bit, just like a real class would. Of course, at this point we only know how to say yes, no, hello, goodbye, and that we only understand a little German. :) And Mike can count to ten, which he picked up from some television program in his youth. We haven't yet gotten to Scopi's nomination for most useful foreign sentences: "Which way is the bus station? I am on the run from the law." (We did skip ahead to get a preview of coming attractions, and ordering beer and wine makes its appearance around lesson five.)

In reality, we'll probably get by just fine with English, but at least we're making the effort!