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Courses with Language Unity? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| divexo Groupie Australia Joined 5030 days ago 70 posts - 74 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 1 of 12 08 September 2010 at 1:03pm | IP Logged |
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Hi,
I've been looking for courses that between each course for the different languages has the same content, so that learning one of those courses greatly helps with another language as they are they same except for the change of Language. In particular I want to get courses with Italian, French and Japanese. Is there such courses available to get? I know of the 1950s-60s linguaphone courses were exactly like this as soon in Prof A's youtube video, where Japanese helped with Italian that helped with French that helped with Norwegian as long as all these other languages but unfortunately I was unable to find any of these except for the Norwegian one that was available online not sure if it was completely legal, so let me know if you know where to get the others, if there is a shop online of sorts. Otherwise, what are some other courses that share this same method of similar language learning aid that can still be bought? I also heard of Berlitz self-learner courses that share similarities between French and Italian, As many as you know will be helpful! Thanks Divexo. Edited by divexo on 08 September 2010 at 1:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5159 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 2 of 12 08 September 2010 at 1:33pm | IP Logged |
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The Teach Yourself: Instant XXX books by Elisabeth Smith all contain more or less the same dialogs translated into different languages.
AFAIK, the following books have been published: Instant French Instant Spanish Instant Portuguese Instant Italian Instant Japanese Instant Russian (Japanese is in Romaji, Russian is transliterated) All of these really thin books teach only the bare minimum needed by tourists, but I like the concept and even though they're by no means perfect, I think they're great to get some idea about the basic concepts of these languages. Also they're dirt-cheap used and new. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6421 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 12 08 September 2010 at 2:19pm | IP Logged |
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Pimsleur is also pretty much the same material, I believe. Basically, it'll teach you the same touristy phrases and picking up chicks in any language. However, the contest is not extensive and the price is sky high.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5220 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 4 of 12 08 September 2010 at 3:48pm | IP Logged |
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Actually, I was wondering the other day whether courses existed that were intended to teach 2 languages in parallel...
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5850 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 12 08 September 2010 at 5:44pm | IP Logged |
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Template courses can't possibly account for the full range of variables in every language, and things that will be trivially simple in one language might be very difficult in another.
Problem A: gender. When you write a course for a specific language, you pick a balanced set of nouns to represent all genders in the language. If you pick a simple set of vocabulary without thinking about this, you could theoretically miss out an entire gender, but more likely you're just going to underexpose the learner to one or more genders, particularly if you have a complicated counting system that is gender-sensitive. Problem B: counting (as alluded to above) There are multiple different ways of distinguishing number. No counting (Australian aboriginal languages) Unmarked nouns (as Japanese) Singular vs plural (eg English) Singular vs dual vs plural (the Oceanic languages) Singular vs paucal vs plural (Slavic) Some of these systems reset to singular after every ten - 1, 11, 21, ..., 101,... 10001 are all singular. Others don't. Some languages count in tens, others in twenties. A single course template with enough examples of each possible distinction would be so long it would bore you silly. Problem C: yes and no. Most of Europe has them -- but not all. The Celtic languages don't and Latin didn't. You have to use the verb for affirmative and negative responses. Chinese has them, but uses them less than English. Again, they like using the verb. Kannada has (I think) one "yes", but two "no", and the distinction is something along the lines of denying vs declining. Any "template" course can only serve a minority of languages properly. If you want to back up your language study from other sources, you could use a multilingual "phrase bank", but that wouldn't be an actual course. Book2.de claims to be a course, but it is just a phrase bank. Edited by Cainntear on 08 September 2010 at 5:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5292 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 6 of 12 08 September 2010 at 6:25pm | IP Logged |
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I'm a little sceptical of the idea that identical content help the learning process. Getting acquainted with the story
line isn't that big an obstacle when learning a foreign language. The Berlitz Self Teacher courses are all very similar, but there are some differences; e.g. the Italian has 42 lessons, the French 41 and the German 38. The Rosetta Stone courses are all identical, as far as I know. And they are said to suffer from the problems Cainntear talk about. Edited by tractor on 08 September 2010 at 6:28pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5430 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French | Message 7 of 12 09 September 2010 at 2:54am | IP Logged |
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You might want to check the Cortina Institute courses. The text is identical for the French and Spanish courses. They even have a course book in Spanish to teach French.
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| divexo Groupie Australia Joined 5030 days ago 70 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 8 of 12 09 September 2010 at 3:14pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks all!
Will definitely look into getting Berlitz self-teacher, and Instant ___. And which Cortina course? "Conversational ___ in 20 lessons?" By the way: Is it a bit excessive to study using Assimil, Berlitz, Instant Italian and Cortina course all at the same time? Which best compliments Assimil? Edit I just found another perhaps 'unity' course, of 'ImmersionPlus', which seems like a very good post-Assimil course! I may get a hold of this one. Edited by divexo on 09 September 2010 at 4:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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