|
 |
Teach Yourself or Living Language? | ||
Tags: Living Language | Teach Yourself | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| BrianDeAlabama Groupie United States Joined 4521 days ago 89 posts - 113 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 6 28 December 2013 at 7:38am | IP Logged |
|
Can someone tell me about Teach Yourself's audio? Is it all target language? How long are the CDs? Do they use
native speakers? I was thinking about buying the TY or some old Living Language stuff. I am planning on buying some Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin & Thai material (not all at once). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4891 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 6 28 December 2013 at 9:45am | IP Logged |
|
If you're looking mostly at the recordings, I think the new Teach Yourself and
Living Language are far superior. Older books tend to have 45" to an hour of recordings, and that's it. The new books come with two (Teach Yourself) to nine (Living Language) full cd's. It's one benefit of modern technology. I've read that the new editions aren't as intensive as the old ones. It's a trade off, I guess - more recordings, but a less rigorous pace. The new TY Catalan had mostly Catalan dialogues and drills. The new LL Japanese had a mix of only-Japanese dialogues, Japanese-English dialogues, and English-heavy drills (at least in the beginning). I assume other languages would be similar. I was really impressed with the LL Japanese. It's a bit less intensive than TY, but for me the pacing really helped. If I ever go back to Arabic I think this would be my personal choice. (There's also a Platinum Living Language series that sounds like it's trying to compete with Rosetta Stone, with online tutors and support. I haven't heard any reviews on it, and didn't think it would be worth the price). Edited by kanewai on 28 December 2013 at 10:39am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6381 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 6 28 December 2013 at 10:23am | IP Logged |
|
All the Teach Yourself courses that I have seen have lots of English in the audio. I edit it down to dialogs only which in my experience comes to about 50 or 60 minutes.
EDIT: I did a quick check of a few of the courses that I have edited: TYS Beginner's Chinese 57 minutes TYS Chinese 43 minutes TYS Chinese Complete 53 minutes Edited by newyorkeric on 28 December 2013 at 3:54pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4911 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 4 of 6 28 December 2013 at 12:41pm | IP Logged |
|
In my experience the Living Language Hindi for Beginners is not very good. One selling point is that it comes with 6 CDs, but that is not an advantage. The first two CDs are just like any other course: the readings, dialogues, etc. So what's on the other 4 CDs? Every Hindi word in the textbook. It sounds like a good idea, but it is actually useless, because they are just read, one after another, without any context. So if a single word appears in an English paragraph, it is read. If there is a table of verb forms, it is just read without any indication of which form is what. It turns out to be a complete waste of time. The textbook isn't too bad, but I felt it was too simplistic.
I count myself as a fan of the whole suite of Teach Yourself Hindi. The original Teach Yourself Hindi book (now Teach Yourself Complete Hindi) gets rather tough quite quickly, and some have complained that it's too grammatical. But on a different forum, I followed an American housewife who used it as her only source. She had questions for those of us who were more advanced than her, but she kept working at it. She went directly from it to reading native books with a dictionary. Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi (I think now it's called Get Started in Hindi) is a perfect textbook, in my opinion. The progress suited me perfectly, not too steep, not to shallow. The exercises are varied and interesting while being challinging yet attainable. I also used Teach Yourself Hindi Conversation since I like audio learning. There is a fair bit of English instruction on this course, but it suited me well. Another advantage the Teach Yourself Hindi books have is that the author, Rupert Snell, has created a wealth of supplementary audio material which is available to download for free from The Hindi-Urdu Flagship. These include vocabulary podcasts for each chapter of TY Hindi (called Glossaries Alive), as well as more advanced discussions of vocabulary on a variety of topics, called Spoken Thesaurus. The website has loads of other resources, including two free readers. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5377 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 5 of 6 28 December 2013 at 2:08pm | IP Logged |
|
The Living Language Ultimate series and Beyond the Basics series are very good courses. The audio is entirely in the target language. The dialogues are done well (a bit dry) and the lessons are quite useful.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5310 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 6 of 6 29 December 2013 at 11:52am | IP Logged |
|
(I've never tried Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin & Thai).
Most of my Teach Yourself audios run for 5x to 6x minutes, with German running for 80 minutes, after removing all English and trimming blank parts to 1 or 2 seconds long. They seem to be native speakers, and seem to have proper pronunciation. Edited by smallwhite on 29 December 2013 at 11:54am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
