jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5020 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese
| Message 1 of 4 17 December 2011 at 5:03pm | IP Logged |
I am a fan of Innovative Language Learning's podcasts. I have very much enjoyed JapanesePod101, which I bought as several ebooks. Until last week, I wasn't sure how to use the site to get the podcasts as they are released.
I have a question to those who have used the podcasts. How accurate do you think their measures of difficulty are?
In Japanese, everything is new to me, so I could not comment one way or another how difficult things were. I can't say if intermediate really is that and if advanced is so much harder.
I can, however, comment on Spanish and German, and I noticed that I was completely understanding their "Advanced" products. While I am not a beginner, I am definitely not advanced in either language. That makes me rather skeptical of the accuracy of such labels.
So to those who have experience with them, how accurate do you think they are?
Thank you for your help.
Edited by jdmoncada on 17 December 2011 at 5:04pm
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jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5020 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese
| Message 2 of 4 20 December 2011 at 1:02am | IP Logged |
I would still like an answer to my question if any of you have thoughts on it. But in the meantime, I will share that I found this thread which as some information about the podcasts (and others):
Pimsleur vs. Podcasts HLAL thread
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5367 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 3 of 4 20 December 2011 at 5:31am | IP Logged |
I think they themselves have admitted that they underestimated the difficulty level. In any case, some of
their lower intermediate stuff might as well be called advanced, no doubt about it. Still, I love Jpod101.
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Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6456 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 4 of 4 20 December 2011 at 8:47am | IP Logged |
jdmoncada wrote:
I am a fan of Innovative Language Learning's podcasts. I have very
much enjoyed JapanesePod101, which I bought as several ebooks. Until last week, I
wasn't sure how to use the site to get the podcasts as they are released.
I have a question to those who have used the podcasts. How accurate do you think their
measures of difficulty are? |
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At GermanPod101, you are supposed to be able to graduate to one of the Upper Beginner
seasons as soon as you've completed one of the Absolute Beginner seasons, graduate from
the Upper Beginner season to a Lower Intermediate one, and so on, so that it takes you
100 lessons to get from zero to Upper Intermediate (more if you don't study the lesson
content carefully). At JapanesePod101, the decision of where to place podcasts is
arbitrary, depending on the native speaker's feel of it. As there are several different
native speakers producing lessons for them, it's also possible that you have trouble
understanding a Lower Intermediate podcast but find the Intermediate podcasts too
easy... Besides, at both sites, each series has a different focus, e. g. learning the
language to talk to family, to live abroad, to do business, and so on. It's best to
listen to the first few podcasts of each series to see which one suits your level and
interest. The first few podcasts of every series are available for free forever.
Edited by Sprachprofi on 20 December 2011 at 8:47am
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