GETOUTIUM Bilingual Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4619 days ago 2 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*
| Message 1 of 15 17 September 2012 at 6:09am | IP Logged |
What is the general range of audio-only courses out there? How many are there? What are
the differences? What are they? Which languages are they available for? I'm sorry if this
looks like a "please do my homework" type of question but I really need to know but I
haven't found anything other than the Pimsleur/Michel Thomas courses. Which are great but
I want to know what other options I have. Thank you for your time.
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Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 2 of 15 17 September 2012 at 7:21am | IP Logged |
Actually it looks more like a "I don't know how to use google advanced search on a domain" type of question.
Here is a link to such a search form on this domain:
google advanced search on htlal
Then just put in "audio only" + courses + maybe the language you are interested in. While I could fill that in for you too, I think you should at least do some of the work.
Edited by Peregrinus on 17 September 2012 at 7:21am
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Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5868 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 3 of 15 19 September 2012 at 11:48am | IP Logged |
Some other courses i know of are:
Learning Spanish Like Crazy (LSLC)
Language Transfer, for Spanish and Greek (and English for Spanish speakers)
There are also "in-flight" and "learn in your car"-style courses, but i'm not sure whether or not those are more than audio phrasebooks.
@Peregrinus: i did a google search and came up with next to nothing, apart from some people using FSI or Assimil without the book and some old Linguaphone courses which they said were rather outdated.
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atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4704 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese
| Message 4 of 15 20 September 2012 at 3:12pm | IP Logged |
"in your car" is not phrasebooky at all.It's actually pretty well structured.
Also, there's Vocabulearn and the LanguagePOD101 products.
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rolf Senior Member United Kingdom improvingmydutch.blo Joined 6010 days ago 107 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch
| Message 5 of 15 20 September 2012 at 11:22pm | IP Logged |
Jeez Peregrinus, give the guy a break and calm down will you?
To the OP, I think MT is the best by far. I don't think Pimsleur even comes close.
Then there are a host of touristy style tapes like the original Linguaphone. There aren't
really any other universal ones but generally language-specific ones. For example,
Mandarin has a podcast series whose name I forget.
I'm looking for good Dutch resources and, aside from MT, there aren't really any good
audio-only ones. It's actually a godsend that there is even MT for Dutch at all.
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Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5962 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin
| Message 6 of 15 21 September 2012 at 3:30am | IP Logged |
The OP doesn't mention what language (s)he is interested in. Depending on the definition of audio only, FSI (http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php) might qualify. Most people will agree that the FSI courses are pretty substantial, plus they're free.
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James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French
| Message 7 of 15 04 October 2012 at 2:49am | IP Logged |
Paul Noble is similar to Pimsleur and Michel Thomas and available in a few languages. Also, there is "All Talk" by linguaphone and there is a Living Language series that is all audio. I would recommend taking a look at Noble, but not All Talk or the Living Language all audio.
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5133 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 8 of 15 04 October 2012 at 6:30am | IP Logged |
@GETOUTIUM:
The two bigger ones are what you've already discovered - Pimsleur and Michel Thomas.
Both courses are good starters, but neither one will take you all that far on their
own.
I'm presuming you are at least somewhat aware of the differences between the two. I
happen to think they both have pluses and minuses, but each method tends to cover the
other's shortcomings. So, for starters, I'd do both, if they're available for your
target language. Doesn't really matter which one you do first, but I don't know that
I'd necessarily do them both at the same time, at least not if it's your first time
learning another language.
At some point, though, you're going to have to move into text, since neither of the
above-mentioned audio courses get you that far.
R.
==
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