Learning a language

[kılıç_mehmet]

Oh, that's going to be a little bit different though. Even though they both speak german, the swiss accent is horrendously unintelligible.
I suggest you go to Switzerland, for the only german you're going to learn from tapes is Hochdeutsch. A few months living in Switzerland could cure that perhaps, developing some ear in the meantime, but it'd be best if you'd learn your german in Switzerland.

Yes that was the thing that has been bothering me since I decided to learn it. As I understood it standard german (Hochdeutsch?) is close to swiss standard german which is what I was aiming for first (used in their educational settings and their literature, which is where I would primarily use it), so no? So you think just book a flight to switzerland to learn it (Or maybe use the L-R method on swiss produced films/books, once I've decided on a dialect?), hmmm....

I'm sure you'd find little difference in literal sense, but the pronounciation of words are rather very different. So if you don't have much an ear for it, it might be rather hard to understand, but with some effort, I'm sure any german speaker can pull it through.
Books, they won't help you much, they're written the same as standard german, it's just that hochdeutsch is the prestige dialect.