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Teach Yourself - a doubt | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6567 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes  Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 41 of 59 16 February 2010 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have Teach Yourself Hungarian and didn't mind it. I've just started using Teach Yourself German - I did use it many years ago, but don't recall what it was like, except that I didn't mind it.
I think it very much depends on your learning style too. But as for me, until I come across one that I really don't like, I'm happy to make TY one of my first purchases and happy to recommend it to others. TY Hungarian carried me a long way into my studies. I found it enjoyable & I feel that it taught the basics quite well. But, each to their own! It's like FSI (or any other program) - some like it, some don't! I cannot comment on the content of any other languages as the only two TY books that I have come across appear to have good content. The Hungarian one was great - and German seems fine so far. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 42 of 59 16 February 2010 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have both the TYS Russian and the Living Language Ultimate Russian, and it's interesting to note that, despite having half the number of chapters TYS Russian has more audio than Ult Russian. I've used Audacity to hack out all of the English in both programs, and it's left me with almost an hour and a half of audio for TYS that covers all of the dialogs and a few of the readings. Ult Rus on the other hand only has about an hour's worth of audio for the dialogs.
I don't think TYS Russian is an ideal book, but it does give a decent grounding and tries to cover much of the basic grammar. I have my doubts about any book that doesn't have the sentence "Where is the bathroom" in it at any point though. Even the most grammar heavy course should have certain survival phrases. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Polyglotted Triglot Newbie Joined 5078 days ago 35 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Russian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 43 of 59 04 August 2010 at 12:44am | IP Logged | ||
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I love the TY series personally, I used a mixture of the 50's and the most recent edition to learn Swedish, in which I reached about intermediate level. The modern ones cover less vocabulary and have less grammar points, whereas the original covered more and there was a lot more vocabulary. I'm currently doing TY Russian along with an old version of Penguin's Russian Course and a few other reference books that I'd previously purchased and I'm finding it quite easy to understand and learn.
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| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5201 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 44 of 59 04 August 2010 at 1:33am | IP Logged | ||
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I have mixed feelings on the TY series as a whole. I go to a lot of used book sales, and when I find a cheap book on a smaller language that I want to learn sometime, I'll grab it just to have it as one more source. In this manner, I've accumulated the black cover TY books for Czech, Bulgarian, Beginners Dutch and Beginners Italian, as well as the 21st century book for Romanian, all on the cheap. I then purchased the 21st century versions of Dutch, Norwegian and Danish at another bookstore for regular price, since at times I felt as though I wanted to learn one of these three, and could never make up my mind.
Regarding TY Danish and Norwegian, I do not like them so much. For both of these books, I find the audio to be waaay too fast for a beginner, and without getting some rudimentary grasp on pronunciation, I refuse to proceed in the book. I've heard that the Norwegian book is good, but it doesn't matter if I do not understand the pronunciation in regards with the words. With the Dutch book, I will either finish it this week or sometime next week, time pending. I find the book to be very boring, yet I find the vocabulary set to be quite nice. This programme nicely expands upon the vocabulary learned in MT and Pimsleur. I do feel, however, that the book is very touristy, and as such, sometimes it comes across as a phrasebook on steroids. I never really looked through my copy of the Czech book, but with the Bulgarian, I found the grammar points to be brief and confusing. With the above said, I am not a huge fan of TY, but it does provide a large array of languages, and for less commonly studied languages, I am happy to obtain what I can and try to learn as much as I can with what I have. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5434 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 45 of 59 04 August 2010 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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The older TY courses are fantastic, I have the Portuguese, Esperanto and Russian ones all from 1965. They are a little hard to come by; luckily newyorkeric told me about abebooks.com. My Russian one was bought from England, and my Portuguese book came from Washington. They are great :)
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| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5704 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 46 of 59 07 August 2010 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I seriously have doubts now on what the new TY series books claim about the proficiency
which one can obtain from using these books. If you look at the new packaging (release in this year under various titles like "Fast track X", " Complete X" etc), the books claims that a beginner can reach various level of proficiency of the Common European Framework. Here is the list of claims: Teach yourself: Last Minute X: to CEF A1 Speak X with confidence / Fast track X : to CEF A2 Getting started in X : to CEF B1 Complete X: to CEF B2 Perfect your X: to CEF C1 I have checked some of these books in the Complete X series. Some of them are just a revised edition of those released in 2003- 2005. Some of these books in this edition never teach more than 1000 words nor the grammar was clearly explained. How on earth would someone reach a proficiency of CEF B2 level, where one is supposed to be a vantage independent user? You need to have a vocabulary of 8000 words for the CEF B2 level. Can someone explain to me why the teach yourself books seems to be overstating what their books can actually teach? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5414 days ago 938 posts - 1839 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 47 of 59 07 August 2010 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree, the TY new gradings are a total a joke! The 'Perfect Your . . . ' series is A2/ just into B1 if you really integrate all of it. This is hard becuase the teaching method used in TY books (at least French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish) touches a linguistic subject once - and then moves onto the next one, without reinforcing the previous one learnt. In my belief TY are good revision texts once you get to B1+ but I actually think they are counter productive before this stage as they are too shallow to effectively teach a beginner language. Of similar courses, the Colloquial, or the little mentioned Oxford Take Off In . . . series are much better for beginners.
The old grammar-translation style 50s/60s TY's are totally boring to look at - yet strangely compelling once you get into them - like a MT course without audio. For learners of French and German I would really recommend the 'A First German/French' in the old series - either as revision or a supplement to MT, Pimsleur or FSI. These two books are really good (although the German has some very formal or, even, out dated words such as 'jener' for a colloquial 'that - there') - about 30 short lessons, comically written, with fun translations. Edited by Elexi on 07 August 2010 at 11:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6864 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 48 of 59 12 August 2010 at 12:23am | IP Logged | ||
It's just good advertising (or bad, depending on your point of view!). Also, I'm sure that it helps their profits. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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