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LearningSpanishLikeCrazy (LSLC) w/ FSI | ||
Tags: Fake Reviews | LSLC | Platiquemos | Pimsleur | Reading | FSI | Book | Grammar | English | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| jpking173 Newbie Joined 7222 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes | Message 25 of 193 16 March 2005 at 8:11am | IP Logged | ||
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heartburn,
I understand what happened. There was a mistake made and I wasn't supposed to receive the interoffice part of the communication. From my end I would never consider using language like that in a place of business and especially in regards to a customer service issue. As I said I find it offensive, not everyone will. Further and more to the point though, the response I received lacked any degree of professionalism. Which is why as you said there are other language programs to choose from. Over the weekend I placed an order for the Pimsleur program and am hoping that it gets the wheels turning again. Have a nice day 
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| crylant Groupie United States cjrylantwealthmanage Joined 7225 days ago 85 posts - 85 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 26 of 193 16 March 2005 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I recently purchased the LSLC set for about $350. I purchased it for a few reasons. I am getting close to finishing the Pimsleur set and began researching where to go from there. One of the main reasons I purchased LSLC was because of the recomendations here of the FSI program. As others have mentioned, LSLC comes with the first two FSI sets. I found LSLC from Amazon reviews and I also immediatly became suspicious and suspect the reviews at Amazon are less than objective. If in fact the Amazon reviews are from someone associated with LSLC, it is a little shady, but the company's approach worked because I found the company and eventually purchased their product.
Another reason for my purchase was because I could actually relate to some of the statements he said on his inofmercial type web site. I like the less formal (tu) approch to his program because I also found Pimsleur to be very formal when I try to use Spanish. I have also had similar experiences with "mucho Gusto / encantado," however, my experiences were not as dramatic as his movie theater story with the two women. To my entertainment, I think another member of this forum called them "skanks." My final decision was a bit out of impulse after I called the company to ask a few questions. To my surprise the owner of the company answered and I enjoyed meeting him. I found him to be very honest and object about other products on the market and he was very helpful. He must be a good salesman because I ended up ordering the product with him on the phone and I am very picky customer. Now let me tell you my opinion of the product and the company. First the product was a little slow in arriving. About 2-3 weeks. I think it was because they were finishing recording some of the last lessons. The owner of the company provided me with a username and password to their web site that allowed me to download the program and start right away. The program is about 32 lessons and I am halfway through it. It is very similar to Pimsleur and the concept is almost a copy. LSLC does a better job of equally covering all of the verb forms. ie. yo, tu, ud, nos, ellos and uds. The main difference from Pimsleur and LSLC is that LSLC has a different grammer topic for each lesson. I think the LSLC set covers the grammer similer to that of a first year college course in Spanish. An example is one lesson covers reflexive verbs and another covers pro-nouns. In my opinion the LSLC method provides new students with an understanding of grammer much better than Pimsleur. LSLC does provide much more information per lesson than Pimsleur as they advertise. This is both good and bad. I found that Pimsleur repeats information over the course of several lessons and the repition tapers away very slowly over the entire course. In the LSLC program there is very, very, little repition from one lesson to the next. I think LSLC provides more information over less time, but, the Pimsleur method is better for long term retention. I may end up going through the entire lSLC set a few times to try to commit the info to long term memory. Having almost finished Pimsleur, I am finding the LSLC program to be a little easy. Having said this I am glad I purchased it because there is not a lot of overlap with the voculary between the two sets and I still have the FSI sets to go through. For the record I am a huge fan of Pimsleur but I will save that for another topic. I also must say another positive comment about LSLC. They recently re-recorded one of their lessons. The first lesson had a speaker who was a little difficult to understand. The fact they re-recorded it said a lot to me about the company and their desire to make a quality product. They could have very easily left the original recording and it would have worked. I also want to coment on the post left by jpking173. I thought it was very funny, both what they said about him and that they screwed up and sent it to him. I would be a little offended but I am also realistic and I know we all joke around at work to make life fun. Unfortunatly for jpking173, he was the blunt of their little joke and they may loose a potential customer. Overall I think the LSLC program is very good. It provides a great place for the true beginer. Had I not taken one Spanish class in college, I would not have understood the gramer and verb congegation as presented by Pimsleur. LSLC does a good job of doing this. An intermediated or advanced student would be board with LSLC alone. I think the company is planning to produce 4 lessons a month, but what they currently offer is not enough for a person to become intermediate or advanced. For what it is worth these are my opinions and they are truly objective. Post any questions and I will provide my input. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| heartburn Senior Member United States Joined 7235 days ago 355 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 193 16 March 2005 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi crylant!
I'm interested in knowing more about the subscription fee and the monthly added lessons. Do you pay a fee? Is any part of your subscription included in the price of the product? What exactly does the subscription include? I read earlier in this thread that LSLC doesn't post new lessons as frequently as they say. Is that true? How complete do you think the course is? Can you make a comparison to Pimsleur in terms of completeness? (Something like, 32 LSLC lessons will get you as far as 41 Pimsleur lessons.) Have you tried the live group lessons? I heard a sample and I didn't really like it. I did like the sample audio lessons though. What do you think of the print lessons? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| crylant Groupie United States cjrylantwealthmanage Joined 7225 days ago 85 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 28 of 193 17 March 2005 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I will try to answer all of the questions heartburn asked in the privious post.
An earlier poster in this topic listed the two different web sites for LSLC. There are two different deals he offers. I was given the username and password for the subscription based web site. I was given this during my phone conversation with the owner of LSLC that I described in my earlier post. I don't know if it is normally given when you pay the $350 or if he gave it to me to convince me to buy it. Either way I am glad I have access to it. That site has downloadable links to all of the lessons that I later received on CD except for the Fast FSI program. Also on that site are recordings of all of the phone group lessons. That is about it. In hindsight it is probably a better deal to pay the subscription fee and download everything and make CDS or use them from your harddrive. The only thing you will miss is the FAST FSI program. I have only had the product for less then two months. In that time he added 4 new lessons and replaced one lesson. I received an email saying they will be adding 4 new lessons this month. The have not been posted yet, but, the month is not over. It is hard to compare LSLC to Pimsleur in the maner you described. "(Something like, 32 LSLC lessons will get you as far as 41 Pimsleur lessons.)" The vocubulary is different so I do not think they can replace each other. I think they complement each other better. I do not think you will learn more from the 32 LSLC lessons than you will from the 90 Pimsleur lessons. It is kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Maybe a similar comparison can be made when/if LSLC offers 90 lessons. I have not tried the group lessons but I also listened to the sample and did not like it very much. I will consider it later but I am a little busy right now with my current Spanish learning program. In case your interested I am doing 1/2 hour Pimsleur, 1/2 hour of LSLC, using the Practice Makes Perfect Verb book, and using flash cards throughout the day. This is may daily routine so I don't have the extra time for the phone lesson. I also have a Spanish class in my community college 2 times a week. I may be trying to many different methods at once but I am progressing fairly well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NYC_Trini_Span Diglot Groupie United States Joined 7251 days ago 60 posts - 66 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 29 of 193 21 March 2005 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm loving the fact that this thread i started is going this far. I would have to agree with Crylant in terms of not being able to compare the 2. I do think that LSLC initially gives you some of the "roots" of spanish grammar much better and within the first few lessons. Things that no beginner should be without. Things like formating a sentence into feminine AND plural without having to think about it (el carro rojo / las mesas rojas) and i speak for myself , but that LITTLE bit cleared up Years of other info. Sometimes the little things are bigger in the picture than you think.
I am a bit put-off as far as LSLC wait until lessons 8-12 to get into the greetings and formalities. Pimsleur was better at that in the sense that in 8 lessons you can do some basic purchasing with money and hey, even order a beer! But in exchange, with LSLC i can meet a woman, lie and tell her i'm a doctor or lawyer, and find out how far she lives and what the street name in no time flat LOL!! No seriously, they are both good for different reasons. I have a friend going to Cancun the same time i'm going to D.R. and i am giving him my Pimsluer (1-8) based on the factor of time- he will need to handle Money, hotels, and restaurants right away, and Pimsleur is best in a short time. While LSLC does cover these things, he would not get to them in time. I'm leaving out on Thursday night so wish me language luck and i'll report back to you all April 4th. Adios Dominican Republic! La Raza! Hay un Dio! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7233 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 30 of 193 27 March 2005 at 11:01am | IP Logged | ||
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The "instructor" in LSLC isn't a native English
speaker, and his diction is sometimes difficult to understand. One pronunciation that was distracting was he made "teeth" a two syllable word. te-eth. In English, "ee" is phonetically called a "long e sound", but "long" has to do with how it sounds, not it's duration. The other class of bothersome pronunciations were sentences that sound like, "What time do you return home yesterday?" That sentence should say "did", not "do". This could be confusing at times, because it would be in the middle of drills for the preterite and present tenses. This isn't a transcription, but the lesson would sound like: What time do you leave the class today? What time do you leave the class yesterday? These sentences would be more commonly said as: What time are you leaving class today? What time did you leave class yesterday? One could make arguments they didn't want to use the present progressive in English and not in Spanish. I.E., other than the "do" vs "did" error, the translation they offer is closer to word for word, which could be helpful. However, in another lesson they use the translation, "I take an hour to get ready", but if they wanted to match the Spanish more closely, and still have good English, they could say, "It takes me an hour to get ready". The advantage of the translation they didn't use is that it's correct and it's closer to the way Spanish is spoken. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NYC_Trini_Span Diglot Groupie United States Joined 7251 days ago 60 posts - 66 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 31 of 193 05 April 2005 at 12:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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This hits home because i just finished the "teeth" lesson while in DR and was glad i brought the transcript. To me it sounded like "Tea". I'm at lesson 14 on my way to 15 now and I must say that my stay in DR was wonderful. Besides my brother and his Dominican born wife and her brother, NO ONE SPOKE ANY ENGLISH and as a result I had mucho tiempo por hablando espanol. I learned so much that is not always found in a book. I'm at work so i can't go too deep but i can finally say i was comfortable talking to a native (well i had no choice really). Although i most likely spoke in broken sentences, i was always understood and got the general context of most things said to me, if not all. Some sentences i would use became second nature and i chained a few new ones together that surprise even myself. Will send the longer version in soon.
BTW- Luke- what lesson are you on? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7233 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 32 of 193 06 April 2005 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | ||
I went up to LSLC lesson 22 and shifted gears. My "commute" material is Barrons FSI lesson 16. My goal is to continue with Barrons FSI while commuting until I finish lesson 30. In the morning and evening, I work from FSI Programmatic Spanish (from LSLC), which requires the pdf textbook. I'm on lesson 15. I also work through a few pages in Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish and Prado's Spanish Grammar each day. I'm making good progress with this approach. I read a few pages from Easy Spanish Reader each day too. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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