jondesousa Tetraglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/Zgg3nRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6256 days ago 227 posts - 297 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Mandarin, Spanish
| Message 25 of 64 10 May 2008 at 9:44am | IP Logged |
Prof. Arguelles,
Thank you so much for these wonderful videos you are creating. I am working on my first foreign language now (Japanese) and I enjoy it immensely. I look forward to learning many more thanks to your inspiration.
I am wondering if you could give a brief review at some point of the Living Languages series. I have seen them in bookstores here in the US, but that simply means they are heavily marketed. Are they worth their weight / cost in terms of learning content? Any thoughts through either a post or a video review would be sincerely appreciated.
By the way, I have been using your scriptorium technique for a few weeks now (certainly not as efficiently as you do), but I have noticed that my ability to write and to read in Japanese has been dramatically improving. I can't exactly explain why, but I can suddenly read kanjified sentences as easily as I can read English.
Thank you in advance for your time and consideration,
Jon
Edited by jondesousa on 10 May 2008 at 9:48am
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workerbee Senior Member United States Joined 6843 days ago 173 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Russian, German
| Message 26 of 64 11 May 2008 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
Dear Professor--
I also have been enjoying your videos. I have been watching both the language series videos and the course reviews. They make some of the study terms much more clear, such as scriptorium...
I was wondering if you plan on reviewing any of the full DLI courses, or if they would have a similar review to the FSI courses? Another question that I had, that is not related, is if you were to start learning a new language--which study path would you take? (Should this have been answered in a separate post, I apologize.)
Thank you--
Krista
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ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7248 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 27 of 64 11 May 2008 at 9:23pm | IP Logged |
Today I added a review for the Living Language series.
I wanted to make a point crystal clear in the video, but as I watched it again before uploading it, I noticed that I had somehow mumbled the fact that: with the oldest, unedited versions of this series, you got 180 minutes of useful audio; with the revised editions, you get about 120-150 minutes of useful audio; however, with the textually much more thorough Ultimate series, you only get 75 minutes of unadulterated dialogue, despite the 8 CD/10 hour potential.
I plan on doing Berlitz next week. I had not planned on a separate DLI review as I believed that method to be covered in the FSI one; if, however, I should ever come to have reason to think otherwise, I will be happy to make one.
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jondesousa Tetraglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/Zgg3nRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6256 days ago 227 posts - 297 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Mandarin, Spanish
| Message 30 of 64 17 May 2008 at 3:28pm | IP Logged |
Dr. Arguelles,
Thanks for your posting of Living Languages. I appreciate your taking the time to post it for us. I am going to pick up the Ultimate Italian this week. Please keep up the good work. It is greatly appreciated and highly motivating.
Sincerest regards,
Jon
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jondesousa Tetraglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/Zgg3nRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6256 days ago 227 posts - 297 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Mandarin, Spanish
| Message 31 of 64 25 May 2008 at 4:20pm | IP Logged |
Prof. Arguelles,
Thank you very much for your informative and helpful reviews. I have recently purchased my first Assimil set to get started in Italian. I am wondering if you would consider posting some audio podcasts or videos on Youtube that would cover more of your methods of language learning as well as tips and suggestions on what doesn't work well. This would be extremely helpful. I have been learning my first foreign language, Japanese, for about 8 months now and am at an intermediate level, but I am sure that I haven't been very efficient in all of my methods.
Any help is, as always, greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jon
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ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6308 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French
| Message 32 of 64 25 May 2008 at 9:59pm | IP Logged |
I would like to second Jon's request. Although so much information and study advice can already be found on this site in great detail, having access to videos which discuss study methods would be extremely helpful not only to the forum members, but also to those who do not post here and might be looking for help on how best and most efficiently to go about learning a first or second foreign language. The several threads on systematic approaches to individual languages could possibly be expanded and made into a very useful series of future videos.
In any case, I would like to once again express my gratitude for these videos. As a result of having seen these reviews, I have since made the effort to track down Assimil's much-praised 1971 Russisch ohne Mühe course and Linguaphone's older Chinese Course. They both look absolutely fantastic, the former in particular.
Christopher Button
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