(c) Copyright Kathy Steinemann

We all spent our earliest weeks lying flat on our backs, unable to fend for ourselves. The bright spots in our days were the strange sounds coming out of the mouths of our parents.

Soon we began to understand those strange sounds and realized what they meant. After many months of listening, we experimented with our young tongues and began to produce our first rudimentary words. Nobody minded if we got the grammar wrong. Reading and writing was still many years away.

Why should we expect to learn differently just because we are older and supposedly wiser?

The fastest progress in foreign language education occurs when we have an opportunity to listen to it. Our brains process the strange sounds and words, collating and organizing the foreign data and associating everything with concepts and objects.

In days gone by, it was difficult to gain audio exposure to the German language unless we were lucky enough to have someone nearby who spoke it. Very few people in North America had access to German television or radio broadcasts.

Our modern era has embraced technology and the Internet. With a few mouse clicks, you can order a good audio book on CD along with accompanying text. Numerous software programs offer interactive audio learning with meters that measure your oral pronunciation skills. German language films are available on DVD.

This article specifically discusses audio books. Audio books will boost your German language learning faster than many methods. However, there are a few important guidelines to keep in mind.

1. Be sure to purchased unabridged audio books, along with the corresponding texts. A good unabridged production will allow you to follow the printed book word-for-word.

2. Concentrate on productions released during the last year or so. They are likely to incorporate recent German spelling reforms. For example, German now uses 'dass' instead of 'daß'. If you find a book with the older spelling of this common word, it is likely to contain other outdated spelling and grammar as well.

3. When buying from a German-language website, watch for terms like those in the following list. (If you do not have a foreign-language keyboard layout, substitute ö or ü with 'oe' or 'ue'.)