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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| flydream777 Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6495 days ago 77 posts - 102 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: German, Russian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Greek, Hungarian, Armenian, Irish, Italian | Message 1 of 7 08 September 2014 at 8:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Anyone who has had experience with several or all of these methods, can you rank them in order of highest
to lowest, pertaining to how much CONTENT of the language they teach. By content I mean not just vocabulary, but verb forms, noun cases, etc. whatever it takes to teach the complete language. I realize these programs are all different and have various strengths and weaknesses, but I'm trying to get a picture of which courses teach the MOST in the long run (all levels). Does Assimil teach more vocabulary than FSI? Where do Michel Thomas and Pimsleur fit in? Assimil Linguaphone FSI Pimsleur Michel Thomas Teach Yourself Living Language Colloquial Any others I might have missed? Edited by flydream777 on 08 September 2014 at 8:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5134 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 2 of 7 08 September 2014 at 8:29am | IP Logged | ||
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There are so many variables, I don't know that any one person could realistically rank all these programs.
First off, are you talking about French-based Assimil, or another base language? Second, which languages being taught are you after? Some of these courses offer a lot of different languages, while others offer just a few. Even if we were to take a major language that would be available in all these courses such as Spanish or French, who in their right mind would go through each of these beginner courses to completion? That would be... kind of sad and soul-crushing, really. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 08 September 2014 at 8:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| flydream777 Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6495 days ago 77 posts - 102 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: German, Russian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Greek, Hungarian, Armenian, Irish, Italian | Message 3 of 7 08 September 2014 at 11:44am | IP Logged | ||
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I know it's kind of an open ended question, I was just wondering for those who have used multiple methods
for multiple languages, which do they find teach more content? For any given language, if you do all of the Pimsleur levels to completion, does it compare with Assimil? Or FSI? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5324 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 4 of 7 08 September 2014 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Most of the above mentioned language course providers offer books and language courses for learners with different proficiency levels. Also not all languages are equally well covered. For example, the Assimil book for language x might be horrible but the version for y might be great. There are also sometimes major differences between different editions of the same textbook. IMHO, the Pimsleur and Michel Thomas/Paul Noble entry level courses teach the fewest vocabulary items, which doesn't necessarily make them worthless, because most Pimsleur courses are quite good at teaching proper pronunciation through repetition and most Michel Thomas/Paul Noble courses are quite good at simplifying grammar rules. The content level of the other providers listed by you differ by language, book, author and edition. IMHO, it'd make more sense, if you asked for recommendations for specific languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5266 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 5 of 7 08 September 2014 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Course, course, course, of course. I think it comes down to expectations. Some people seem to depend on and expect the course to teach them the language, and are inevitably disappointed when they fall short of that goal. Whose fault is it then, the course, or the learner's expectations (often fueled by hype)?
A course should serve to give a foundation upon which a learner can construct and build. The recent thread started by s_allard How many words to speak? illustrates that it's not how many words a learner knows, it's what the learner can do with them. Year in and year out we'll see a post slamming Pimsleur because it only teaches "500" words. There's also usually the one where someone will praise Assimil to the high heavens and come up with a plan to "over-learn" the course because "there is just so much in it". Whether it's 500 words or 5,000 words, the amount is irrelevant if the knowledge isn't consolidated. Pimsleur's smaller amount of words are repeated so often and brought up at graduated intervals that, to me it really helps to give a good start in a language, especially with pronunciation and helping to give "automaticity" in speech, especially when the pause button is ignored. Could the same be done with a phrasebook and a skype tutor? Yes, of course- but only the phrasebook comes in a box (so to speak). Most people won't take the time, trouble and effort to design their own "course" with the words they need and want to learn. "FSI" courses were developed by the US Foreign Service Institute to teach diplomats, 40 years ago. The courses are very thorough and I, along with others, find the drills to be highly useful. What most people tend to forget is that the courses were designed to be used in a complete language-learning program and the courses themselves only represent a "part" of that program. Assimil is so highly praised here that at times I think "HTLAL" is an acronym for "How To Learn Assimil Languages". The course has been highly useful to many members here, but it isn't the "begin all and end all" of language-learning. The audio is my biggest gripe with the program. It is unnaturally slow and clear by design. Even at the last lesson, in my opinion, it isn't at native speed. The hype built up on HTLAL about Assimil leaves some beginners to think it will solve all their problems with learning a language. It's that attitude that is so frustrating to me. With other commercial courses, there's also the publisher's own marketing hype to contend with, so prominently placed and designed to lure the purchaser with often false promises. So, yes, all of these courses have different foci and different ways of teaching. The number of words taught is not the metric I would use to judge their efficacy. Depending on courses alone to do all the heavy lifting in learning a language is fool's gold. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. In my experience it is best to combine two or three of them and supplement them with real world use of the language to consolidate and build upon what has been learned. That's the hard part, when the course isn't there to hold the learner's hand anymore, especially if the learner has depended too much on the course. Edit;
No, but that doesn't mean Pimsleur has no value. It works on a different level. Yes it has its issues- too much English, overly focused on traveling businessmen, some sexist "pick-up" dialogs, cost (never buy it of the rack, get it from a reseller or the library through an inter-library loan). If you do three levels of the course combined with a more thorough course and outside the course use of the language, it can be highly useful despite the fact that it is not a "one-stop" language-learning resource. Edited by iguanamon on 08 September 2014 at 4:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4913 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 6 of 7 08 September 2014 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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The hype over Assimil is all about the fact that it has been effective and interesting
when so many courses were only one or the other, or neither. My only experience is with French, but I find the Assimil audio to be just as fast as any professionally produced audio, such as newscasts and audiobooks. But more importantly, it uses quite natural conversation from the very start (or within a few chapters). I agree Pimsleur is an excellent introduction to a language, but even midway through Level 3 in French, the conversations still seem very unnatural. I also agree that different courses have different value: Michel Thomas for getting the verbs down, Pimsleur for a lot of speaking practice. The OP didn't mention Hugo's In 3 Months series, which are supposed to give a better overview of grammar than other introductory textbooks (one of Assimil's weaknesses). Anyway, to return to the OP's question, in terms of total content, I imagine FSI has the most, although I have no idea about the total vocabulary or if it misses out important aspects of grammar (I'm about 30% of the way through FSI French). It is certainly the course with the greatest amount of audio, 95% of which is native language only. In terms of introductory textbooks with the most vocabulary, Assimil wins this one. New French with Ease has around 2500 items of vocabulary, and if you do the course as suggested (even without overlearning), you will be able to at least passively understand most of them. But it is a bit weak when it comes to teaching grammar in a systematic way. From what I've seen from looking over it, Hugo's In 3 Months series probably wins the award for "best all-round" course. Teach Yourself, Living Language and Colloquial are all quite similar, clearly try to target the same sorts of users, and they all vary quite a bit from language to language. For example, I think Teach Yourself Hindi and Teach Yourself German are quite good, and full of content. On the other hand, Teach Yourself French seems to be dumbed down. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4258 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 7 of 7 08 September 2014 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Your question is a difficult one to answer with any sort of specific accuracy, but I think the gaps between certain courses are big enough that I think it's possible to group them into different classes that are roughly equivalent.
DLI - Some DLI courses are just absurdly gigantic, and probably more content than you need as a beginner, the method doesn't seem as popular here as FSI, but if for some reason you can't find content anywhere else, there's a lot here. FSI - by far the most audio in terms of sheer minutes, but most of it is drills and practicing the same vocabulary, I would guess that it's roughly similar to Assimil in terms of vocabulary introduced, but of course this varies from course to course. Assimil - again this varies greatly from course to course, but Assimil's are generally just blocks of graded content, so there's a lot more than most typical language courses, some of the older assimil courses are unparalleled in this area. Living Language - There are a lot of variants to this series of differing quality, Living Language Ultimate series might be comparable to FSI and Assimil, I've used this method less than others. Linguaphone - This method I've also used a bit less, from looking through the courses it seems like there's not quite as much as an Assimil course, but they're not too far off and it might be comparable with some of the newer lighter Assimil courses. Teach Yourself - The basic beginner course format, lots of grammar explanations, followed by dialogs for each lesson. Enough content for a complete beginner course, but not quite as much as the above courses. Colloquial - Very similar format to teach yourself. Pimsleur- A good method, but not a complete beginner course. There's a lot of audio content, but mostly focused on repeating, revising, and developing automaticity to get you started speaking comfortably. They've recently started extending their old courses, so maybe eventually it will be a full beginner course, but I still think they have a long way to go before they match even the most basic ones. Michel Thomas - Less vocabulary than pimsleur, but much more grammar practice. Some of the original courses cover most of the basic grammar points you'll need, but you'll definitely need to supplement this with some extra vocab. Edited by YnEoS on 08 September 2014 at 4:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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