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Strokes? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7124 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes  Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 1 of 6 13 January 2010 at 5:55am | IP Logged |
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Someone was pushing these with the hard-sell in Dubai airport, and I was intrigued, until I saw the price...
http://www.strokes-international.com/us/languages/languages. htm Has anyone used them, or even heard of them? I'd be interested to know what you think of them, as I'd never heard of them before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| goosefrabbas Triglot Pro Member United States Joined 6371 days ago 393 posts - 475 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 6 13 January 2010 at 6:13am | IP Logged |
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Looks interesting. Possibly something like the older Linguaphone courses with some flashy computer programs to help it out? It says there's 100 dialogues and that they're all recorded. Aside from that, it could range from a RosettaStone-like program with the pronunciation and vocabulary trainers and exercises to to some of the semi-old Living Language courses with a course book and a dictionary. I did a quick YouTube and Amazon search and couldn't find anything. I did a search on DealOz, searching keywords "strokes easy learning" and found a bunch of 100 courses for about $100, 100+101 courses for about $150, and a Russian 100+101+201 for $200. Those are at huge discounts compared to the prices listed on the Strokes website. I nominate you to buy and review a set! :P
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6473 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 6 13 January 2010 at 10:58am | IP Logged |
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Strokes is a major company selling language software in Germany, at least I've seen a lot of their programs in the local bookstore. They also had some demo CD-Roms... if I can find mine, I'll upload it somewhere for evaluation.
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| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7124 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 4 of 6 13 January 2010 at 6:33pm | IP Logged |
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OK, goosefrabbas, you're on! Obviously I'd expect everyone here to chip in and I'll make the ultimate self-sacrifice of having to sit there and learn another language.
I am wary of software. It can be very good, or truly awful like (ahem) Rosetta Stone. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5563 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 5 of 6 16 January 2010 at 4:43pm | IP Logged |
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I've only perused it rather than made any serious use, but to me it looks like "Talk to me" which was a sort of basic version of "Tell me more".
There's a dialog of five or six sentences, you can listen to each individually, or word by word. There are vocab and grammar exercises and you can record your voice. I'm sure it's much cheaper in the shops than on their website. The demo on their website gives quite a good indication. Personally, I find the interface looks at least ten years old, but it seems to work ok. Minor personal obessive compulsive quibbles: it siezes hold of the whole screen, so you need to use alt-tab to switch to other programmes, but for some reason all language programmes seem to do that (don't they understand the purpose of "windows"?) it tries to hide its audio data in .dll files (but you can still import them "raw" into audacity if you want. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 6 16 January 2010 at 7:19pm | IP Logged |
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Just going through the demo on the web.
To me it looks pretty standard. The dialogue exercises are a straightforward reworking of the Transparent Language methodology, which is 20 years old (see this review of language software from 1991 and I've never liked. Beyond that, it's just standard multimedia exercises -- drag-and-drop word matching, gap fill etc. The drag-and-drop matching looks pointless (as always). First up, why do I need to drag when I could just click? The vocabulary is given a word at a time, so I'm only choosing one item, the translation. But more importantly, there is no real pattern to the words presented -- it is simply the words used in the lesson. The example given uses the following (in English for speakers of German) and (und) how (vie) really (wirklich) nice (schön) thanks (danke) you (du) hello (hallo) from (aus) not (nicht) name (Name) meet (kennen lernen) your (dein) If the obvious ones aren't a waste of time, then the non-obvious ones might be too difficult. Also the massive difference between the meanings of the words means you can do the exercise without being sure of the answer. I'm unlikely to confuse "hello" with "meet" in any language, and if I do after you attempted to teach me them both then you're clearly not teaching me right! I'm also concerned by any course that can present "Do you have a flu?" as real English. I'd say "the flu", and others would just say "flu", but I'm not aware of any major dialect where you'd say "a flu". Even if the methodology or the technology was any good (and it doesn't look like it to me), poor quality control on the language itself is unforgivable. Then of course I'm pretty certain that like most other software packages, it's what I call "template teaching" -- have a template for the dialogues and translate all languages to fit it, ignoring the relative difficulty of certain language combinations. What's easy to do when learning English from German will be difficult to do when learning Arabic from English, French from Chinese, etc. Edited by Cainntear on 16 January 2010 at 7:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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