xi Course Content When you have mastered a Pimsleur Course, you will have a highly practical vocabulary at your command. These basic words, phrases, and sentences have been carefully selected to be most useful in everyday situations when you visit a foreign country. You will be able to graciously handle social encounters and travel situations, to converse with native speakers in hotels, restaurants, and shops, to use transportation systems, post offices, and phone systems — all with confidence. You will also be able to give information about yourself, your family, your home, and your friends. With this knowledge and ability, you’ll be able to make the most of any opportunity for communicating with new acquaintances and for understanding a new, exciting culture. You will also know how to pronounce the written language. With this informa- tion, you’ll be able to read signs, maps, and dictionaries, which is extremely useful when traveling in an unfamiliar land. You’ll be able to ask directions and to navigate your own way around the cities and countryside. The language skills you will learn will enable you to participate in casual conversations, express facts, give instructions, describe, report, and provide narra- tion about current, past, and future activities. You will be able to deal with everyday survival topics and courtesy requirements. You will be intelligible to native speakers of the language—even those who are not particularly used to dealing with foreigners. What is equally important, you will know how to ask the kinds of questions that will further expand your knowledge and linguistic sophistication, because you will have been trained by the Pimsleur open-ended questioning technique. Learners trained by this method can easily be phased into whatever other instruction may be available, depending upon one’s language-fluency requirements. Many job requirements overseas do not require native-like fluency. Pimsleur pro- grams provide training levels to fit the needs of the task, and in today’s global market, they enable American staff to have sufficient competency in a considerable number of diverse foreign languages—with a very short timespan for training. The Pimsleur System becomes a springboard for further learning and growth—