German 2 All the Way

This course is an earlier edition of the current, Living Language Ultimate German Advanced. It is for practical purposes the same as the present, highly regarded version, but, because it is not the current edition and by a different publisher, it can often be found at very attractive prices. For an fundamentally accurate description of this course, and for reader appraisals, look at the listing for Ultimate German Advanced.

This cassette/book combination is very flexible; contents directed at a strong-intermediate-to-advanced college level. 4 cassettes deliver 10 dialogues of increasing length and difficulty, with up-to-date adult topics including Rostock and the Hanseatic league, a software training classroom, an apartment search, a mid-level job interview, Austrian wine tasting and Mardi Gras. Each dialogue is presented in its entirety, followed by a sentence-by-sentence breakdown that permits listen-and-repeat. The other 4 cassettes follow the same 10 dialogues, but offer more traditional interactive drills, with useful explanations. (In my case, the first 4 were more useful than the second, but I thought the drills were well-crafted. The text is also very useful for the cultural/etiquette pointers and to help understand the colloquilisms (sp?). I borrow it from the library when I can--that's not easy, because it seems to fly off the shelf.