But Keine Panik! (Don't panic!) says award-winning Professor James Pfrehm in Learning German: A Journey through Language and Culture. With crystal-clear explanations and a cache of insider tricks, he conducts you through a full year of college-level German in 30 delightful, half-hour lessons. And with Professor Pfrehm's engaging and entertaining teaching style, you will actually want to repeat each lesson! You'll learn all the skills needed to understand and speak basic German: from its sounds and vocabulary to its wondrously challenging grammar. You'll be able to engage with films, literature, and other media in German. And most important, you'll be ready to travel to any German-speaking country—whether it's Germany, Austria, Switzerland, or others. The signs, menus, greetings, and customs will be more meaningful to you, and you'll be equipped to converse at an elementary level. In short, you'll be well on your way to forging your very own “journey” through the German language!

The 36 lectures of Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language—taught by acclaimed linguist, author, and Professor John McWhorter from Columbia University—are your opportunity to take a revealing journey through the fascinating terrain of linguistics. You focus on the scientific aspects of human language that were left out of any classes you may have taken in English or a foreign language, and you emerge from your journey with a newfound appreciation of the mysterious machinery built into all of us—an appreciation likely to surface time and again in your everyday life.   In Understanding Linguistics, you explore the vast field of scientific linguistics and discover why this burgeoning field is becoming increasingly important in your everyday life:

• Glean the real meanings hidden in everyday conversations.
• Understand the process by which young children learn to speak.
• Comprehend that changes in language (including new words, constructions, or usages) are a normal and inevitable part of the language's evolution.
• Grasp the complex interaction of language, brain structure, and the physiology of the human mouth.
• See how the science of language can reveal nuances of human history beyond the reach of any other discipline.

Dr. John McWhorter, one of America's leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 300,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 7,000 languages used around the world today.   An accomplished scholar, Professor McWhorter is also a skilled popularizer, whose book The Power of Babel was called "startling, provocative, and remarkably entertaining," by the San Diego Union-Tribune. The London Times called him "a born teacher." And Steven Pinker, best known as the author of The Language Instinct, offered this praise for the book: "McWhorter's arguments are sharply reasoned, refreshingly honest, and thoroughly original."