luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 1 of 10 13 April 2005 at 7:59pm | IP Logged |
Immersion Plus "the final step to fluency" is a 3 CD program from Penton Overseas available in Spanish, French, German, and Italian. I've only heard the Spanish edition.
(Somehow I thought we reviewed this as a proper topic, but I didn't find it in my searches).
Immersion Plus is a series of dialogs in the target language. Each dialog is repeated at three speeds, almost normal, very slow, and normal. There is a small booklet that comes with the CD set that has the dialog transcripts and English translations.
Immersion Plus is available as part of the Penton "24" series for the languages listed above. If you're looking for 24 CDs of a decent program at a good price, check out Penton 24 for your target language. Immersion+ is also available as a separate program.
heartburn had a few criteria in his open letter to publishers, and I know he has mentioned he likes Immersion Plus. Regarding a couple of his points. The introductions are a separate track. Most of the annoying music is in the introductions, and is easy to skip.
I'm trying an approach Ardaschir mentioned in the Assimil thread. Immersion Plus is easy to adapt to that approach. I just extracted the normal speed dialogs and did a single audio edit to remove a flute tone from the end of each track. The dialogs don't have pauses for you to repeat, which made editing simple. This left about 43 minutes of material. What really excites about Ardaschir's bilingual technique is I'm understanding the recording better than I'd have expected, based on my level, and the realism of the dialogs.
I have a question for anyone with Immersion Plus for other languages. It's in reference to an Ardaschir post about Linguaphone. The question is do the French, German, and Italian courses use the same dialogs? To make it easier to answer the question, here are the "topics" on the Spanish CDs:
buying_a_house
dining_out
going_golfing
going_shopping
the_election
the_fishing_trip
the_ocean_cruise
Each dialog has 2-4 parts which run for 1 - 4.5 minutes. I give it two thumbs up as an adjunct to a "multitrack" learning method.
Edited by luke on 06 March 2006 at 5:06am
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heartburn Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 355 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 2 of 10 13 April 2005 at 8:30pm | IP Logged |
I think the Spanish Immersion+ is a great product. I like the fact that they give you translations, transcriptions, and readings at various speeds. There are so many ways you can use the material.
Unfortunately, my copy was on cassette, not CD. So after I recorded it to my PC, I edited out the slow and fast versions of each dialog and put them on my iPod. That left them perfectly usable.
The only complaint that I can think of is that in some of the dialogs, the voices are too similar. At first, it's difficult to distinguish which speaker is talking. They should have tried to use a male and a female speaker in each dialog for more contrast.
If they make any more of these Immersion+ things, I'll be first in line to buy them.
Edited by heartburn on 13 April 2005 at 9:48pm
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pentatonic Senior Member United States Joined 7247 days ago 221 posts - 245 votes
| Message 3 of 10 14 April 2005 at 5:20am | IP Logged |
The German version has the same topics and I see where you're going with this so here's the first paragraph from the first dialogue, dining out:
immersionplus German wrote:
Katrina weren't we going out for dinner tonight? I thought I smelled dinner cooking when I came in. |
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I imagine that your Spanish version uses something other than the very German names of Werner and Katrina but perhaps the other text is all the same.
Apparently, there is a lot of cliche and bad acting because my wife burst out laughing when she heard the dialogue I played for her, but she said the pronunciation was good. I haven't used immersionplus yet but plan to do something like you are in the future. Keep us informed as to how Ardaschir's technique works with this product. At $20 it's a good bit cheaper than the Assimil audio.
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luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 4 of 10 07 May 2005 at 12:18pm | IP Logged |
pentatonic wrote:
The German version has the same topics. |
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Italian immersionplus has the same dialogs too. Apparently they just change the names of the dialog participants. An amazon reviewer of the Italian version didn't like the translation. They apparently didn't know Penton Overseas used the same English text for all four different languages.
The dialogs sound appropriate to life in the U.S. Do they seem realistic in other countries?
Edited by luke on 06 March 2006 at 5:06am
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ElComadreja Senior Member Philippines bibletranslatio Joined 7238 days ago 683 posts - 757 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Cebuano, French, Tagalog
| Message 5 of 10 07 July 2005 at 10:34pm | IP Logged |
I was looking for some Spanish book on tape dealy today, but apparently, they don't carry that sort of thing in Houston bookstores.
Anyway, I stumbled across this and it sounded like some of what I needed anyway.
Having browsed through the first 9 dialogues, it looks like the people on the CDs talk a bit slower than normal and quite clearly, but they are all bad actors. Actually, it has this weird rhythm of fast, slow, fast, slow, fast...
Buy really, my only complaint that that the speakers *do* speak clearly.
Edited by ElComadreja on 07 July 2005 at 10:46pm
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sodonnell203 Newbie United States Joined 6841 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 6 of 10 03 March 2006 at 6:16pm | IP Logged |
Hello - I recently purchased Immersion+ Italian from Audible.com in a
downloaded secure format. I'm disappointed because it did not come
with an electronic booklet with the transcriptions of the dialogues. Does
anyone use this project and have an electronic version of the booklet with
the transcripts of the dialogues? I'm really at the beginning stages of my
language study and need to be able to read the dialogue as I listen. Can
anyone help me?
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Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7103 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
| Message 7 of 10 06 March 2006 at 2:59am | IP Logged |
Not sure how totally useful this is....
...but Penton Overseas started marketing some of their courses provided with U-Print (also known as U-Pay-For-The-Paper-And-Printer-Ink) electronic copies of the the booklets that accompany the CDs.
Anyway there is a link here to the Italian Immersion Plus PDF.
PDFs for other languages and their other courses are here.
Perhaps you could let us know whether it's complete.
Andy.
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luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 8 of 10 06 March 2006 at 4:24am | IP Logged |
The U-print books go along with Penton's Global Access, which is the first 1/3 or 1/2 of their courses. Penton does a remarkable job of packaging up the same thing in different ways.
Edited by luke on 06 March 2006 at 5:07am
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