Ich verstehe nur ein bißchen Deutsch.

So, I'm trying to learn German. I found a couple of podcasts, but the one I've listened to the most hasn't helped tooooo much. I also bought some CD's at Barnes and Noble (by Pimsleur, for those language geeks who know about such things) and they're not bad. Unfortunately, they're also expensive as heck for the whole course ($660 for three courses on Amazon, though I am sure I can find it cheaper). There's the added problem that it's purely a spoken language course. There's no reading of writing. I need to get a dictionary to help me see what I'm learning.

Rosetta Stone ($329 for levels I and II) has a nice PC-based course, but it's also expensive as hell. It does focus on reading and writing as well as spoken language, but from my understanding the spoken language portion isn't as good as Pimsleur. Ultimately, I'd like to do a combination of both, but I also don't want to spend $1000+ on language courses for fun.

So far, the hardest thing for me is the German pronunciation of the letter 'r' in words like Amerikaner (the first 'r').

Any way I go, I'm going to have to find some people to speak German with eventually. Luckily I have a co-worker who is from our German mother company, so I have him for at least a while. And I can always watch Run Lola Run over and over.