Alvinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 6177 days ago 828 posts - 832 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish
| Message 1 of 59 17 December 2008 at 2:07pm | IP Logged |
I bought a Teach Yourself book with 2 CDs in one of the main S.Paulo's bookstores yesterday.....there was a shelf full of TY books of almost all the languages and then I decided to purchase a Norwegian book...
I wonder if someone has ever bought one single TY book and after some weeks just studying what the result has been achieved.
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Lindsay19 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5764 days ago 183 posts - 214 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC1 Studies: Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic
| Message 2 of 59 17 December 2008 at 3:53pm | IP Logged |
Alvinho wrote:
I bought a Teach Yourself book with 2 CDs in one of the main S.Paulo's bookstores yesterday.....there was a shelf full of TY books of almost all the languages and then I decided to purchase a Norwegian book...
I wonder if someone has ever bought one single TY book and after some weeks just studying what the result has been achieved. |
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I have the Teach Yourself Swedish edition; it's pretty hard to come by anything Swedish where I'm at, so I buy anything I find in books stores. To be honest, I haven't really been using it. I did notice though (after aquiring a little bit of Swedish through a different book), that I could do the exercises alright, but only because I was already familiar with the material.
For example, a few of the listening exercises asked you to construct sentences (this was the beginning of the first chapter), but I don't think a complete beginner would know the sentence structure all that well enough to answer. The CDs are useful though, I guess.
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TerryW Senior Member United States Joined 6300 days ago 370 posts - 783 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 3 of 59 17 December 2008 at 6:18pm | IP Logged |
I have a side question here:
"Teach Yourself - a doubt"
At work, I occasionally receive emails from our branches in Spain and Latin American countries where they say something like "I have a doubt for you."
Just like the title of this thread, "doubt" seems to = the noun "question" in these cases.
As far as I know, in the U.S., "doubt" never means (noun) "question," it means kind of a dis-belief, as in "I doubt that will happen."
Is it used in the U.K. like this? Why do Spanish-speaking (OK, and maybe Portuguese-speaking) people use "doubt" to mean question?
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anamsc Triglot Senior Member Andorra Joined 6146 days ago 296 posts - 382 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan Studies: Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Written), French
| Message 4 of 59 17 December 2008 at 7:54pm | IP Logged |
I used Teach Yourself Catalan, and it gives you an okay level, but I agree with Lindsay19. I feel like the explanations are a bit lacking, especially when it comes to grammar. I felt like if I didn't have some familiarity with Spanish grammar, I would have no idea what was going on. The CDs are good, though; they give you lots of dialogs and such.
TerryW,
In Spanish, una duda (and in Catalan, un dubte) is usually translated as "a doubt", but it is also commonly used in this way, to mean "a question". I can only assume it's the same way in Portuguese, but I really have no idea.
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TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6023 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin
| Message 5 of 59 18 December 2008 at 2:58am | IP Logged |
There are a lot of words in the TY Chinese I have. A guesstimate would be around 500, probably more. There is also a lot of grammar covered, but not to a sufficient level for a complete beginner. I don't think that TY can be used on it's own to learn a language, but it is a very good complement, IMHO.
TEL
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Hollow Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States luelinks.netRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6482 days ago 179 posts - 186 votes Speaks: French*, English*, SpanishB2 Studies: Korean
| Message 6 of 59 18 December 2008 at 4:00am | IP Logged |
TerryW,
same goes for French, where its perfectly normal to say something like: " j'ai un doute sur ce point- la"
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Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5954 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 7 of 59 18 December 2008 at 8:51am | IP Logged |
The question isn't the doubt; rather the question is to seek an answer, and the answer will remedy the doubt.
A doubt here is an uncertainty -- I am uncertain about something.
IE
"I am unsure about something but if you answer this question I will no longer be in doubt. What is the capital of Azerbaijan?"
But I find TY very difficult to use as a main text. I've never finished a TY book.
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sajro Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5939 days ago 129 posts - 131 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 8 of 59 18 December 2008 at 11:07am | IP Logged |
I find TYS to often be a bit touristy. Too many language courses turn out to be glorified, overcomplicated phrasebooks. Of the "off-the-shelf" varieties, the few Colloquials I've seen seem to have the fewest touristy qualities, but I cannot attest to their usefulness, as I've never used one.
Overall I find TYS best for the vocabulary section in the back, personally.
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