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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5351 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes  Speaks: Spanish* | Message 17 of 36 30 April 2013 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you very much for your recommendation of advanced Japanese textbooks! Looking at Amazon's preview, they look quite promising. I can make out some of the text of volume 6, but would use them only after establishing a more solid foundation. I will most likely obtain the last four of the series as per your advice they contain little Chinese, which I have yet to study, and they seem to include longer reading passages. That they include recordings of the texts is absolutely fantastic, though it seems volume no. 8 does not? Do you think I would be missing out on much if I skip the supplementary volumes, seeing again that I cannot read Chinese? To make sure, these are the links to volumes 5, 6, 7 and 8 of the main texts?
About Russian, there is the fabulous Learning Russian by N. Potapova from the 1950's or early 60's in four volumes which though not monolingual features rich and copious reading passages along with brief and to the point grammatical explanations in English that together provide the student with a substantive knowledge of the language. This title is one of the best textbooks I have encountered for any language and represents a model of what language learning materials should aspire to, but sadly manuals of its type are indeed rare. A monolingual series that is useful as well is Дорога в Россию in four volumes too. Edited by Juаn on 30 April 2013 at 11:27pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6157 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 18 of 36 01 May 2013 at 10:22am | IP Logged | ||
I was just studying this last night, and it's very good. However, unlike a lot of mono-lingual courses I use, there is no answer key online or a teachers guide with the answers. This is probably one of the best Russian courses I've used for practising your cursive script. The first volume also has four CD's worth of audio, making it longer than an Assimil course. For a very thorough modern course, I'd recommend the 700 page "Rus' A Comprehensive Course in Russian". It's primarily designed for classroom use and doesn't translate the vocabulary, but it has over five hours worth of audio. It's meant to reach the CEFR level of B2. Edited by DaraghM on 01 May 2013 at 10:24am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4283 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 19 of 36 03 May 2013 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the Russian suggestions. I will certainly look for them.
Juan, I apologise for a late reply. I have just managed to find some time to review the books and the comments once more to make sure you make the right purchase. At first glance, all these books did not seem to be for you. But as I now look at them again after reading your response, I think the last 4 books, as you have mentioned, might be good for your advanced studies, especially when you cannot find any other decent monolingual series or at least progressive teaching manuals. Even if you find that they are not suitable for textbook studies, they might well serve as readers. Let me add/clarify/correct a few points about this advanced series. Every book is accompanied by a CD. I have not yet checked the CDs; according to the descriptions in amazon.cn, there are a total of 16 hours of recordings. The series presupposes a solid foundation of Japanese in the learners: it certainly assumes the knowledge of the preceding series, but every netizen I have seen thinks the gap between the 2 series is not narrow. The purpose of it, as it anticipates already high level of proficiency, is to provide longer and more diverse articles and literature to enable learners to read extensively and use the language professionally. I was wrong to assume the "indication" thing about the accompanying Chinese explanations. I agree that they are bonus, but not necessary components of the manuals. In fact, Japanese explanations are full, and the Chinese parts are just literal translations of the vocabulary and example sentences. Each chapter of the books from the series contains 1 core reading passage, which is followed by footnotes, a list of new vocabulary, explanation of grammar and demonstration, exercises and, lastly, 1 or 2 additional reading passages. Here is a breakdown of Chapter 1 of the 6th book: 4.5 pages of core reading 1 page of footnotes 5 pages of explanation of new vocabulary 7 pages of explanation of grammar 3 pages of a reinforcement section (different emphases in each book) 8.5 pages of exercises 1 page of a section which introduces the language or literature 3.5 pages of 1 additional reading passage with 0.5 page of footnotes Given the series is prepared by a group of professors under governmental supervision for undergraduate studies, I assume the exercises are there for real learning but not decorations. Unfortunately, I am not in the position to judge their quality and usefulness. Merely relying on the number of pages it seems they are quite important. As you might have noticed, the 5th and 6th have 400 pages each, while the other two have approximately 200 respectively. Roughly I think they have about the same amount of readings, but the 7th and 8th have fewer explanations and exercises. There are 2 supplementary manuals, each of them for 2 teaching manuals. The answer and translation of Chapter 1 of the 6th book contains 5 pages of answers and 3.5 pages of translations. I think you can wait until the 4 teaching manuals arrive before deciding whether the 2 supplements are needed, since the (very high...) cost is more or less the same. Colombia belongs to Latin America, right? DHL: 125RMB per item FEDEX (assumes single shipment; amazon US always splits mine...): Four books: 200 + 90*4 = 140 RMB per item Six books: 200 + 90*6 = 123.33RMB per item I hope this helps. Please feel free to ask me if you have further questions. I would love to give a hand. Paco P.S. The four URLs in your last post are correct. Hera are links to the supplements: 5/6 7/8 May I ask what level your Japanese is at? What poses the greatest difficulties when Spanish speakers reach a relatively advanced level? Would it still be Kanji? And, are you aware of any decent Spanish textbooks suitable after my programme? Or could you point me to a direction where I am likely to find out about them? Edited by Paco on 03 May 2013 at 9:27pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5538 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 36 03 May 2013 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Another excellent monolingual French course: Grammaire progressive du français : niveau perfectionnement. This is probably useful for students around B2 or C1. There are good explanations, example sentences, exercises, and a few interesting texts to read. The grammar includes both a review of most major topics up to that point, plus a wide variety of things that advanced students tend to mess up. This is a genuinely well-written book, and a pleasure to flip through at random. It would be quite reasonable to do one lesson a day for a month and a half or so.
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| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5351 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 21 of 36 04 May 2013 at 12:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Paco, from your response it seems the books might indeed be useful for advanced study. That they include so much recorded material makes them even more appealing. One drawback is that they have too much explanation and exercises. If I understood correctly from your earlier post, these, the explanations and exercises in the main volumes, are entirely in Japanese? Is in fact everything in those 4 volumes in Japanese? The Chinese explanations you mention are in the main volumes or in the accompanying ones?
Your post is extremely helpful and I thank you for taking the time. I think this series will be very valuable for advanced students, at which level quality materials are scarce. I will order them along with some volumes of Boya Chinese and New Practical Chinese Reader that I'm collecting in anticipation of the moment when I may engage the Chinese language, which will only be after having taken my Japanese to a comfortable level. About which, my Japanese is at a lower intermediate stage. The greatest challenge for me in any language is vocabulary acquisition, as you need vast quantities of it in order to read good books, which is my purpose for learning them. Even in the case of Russian which is generally regarded as presenting a specially complex grammar, it has been a long time since I can intuitively comprehend the grammatical composition of texts, yet my lack of vocabulary still prevents me from approaching books in a meaningful way. In the case of Japanese, kanji pose multiple challenges additional to those present in learning other languages. For one, as someone who encounters the language mainly through texts, learning the reading of each word can be exacting. Often I know the meaning of a sentence but simply cannot remember how to pronounce any of its words. Additionally, as my method involves texts without translation with constant recourse to the dictionary, looking up unknown words when I don't remember the readings of kanji is time consuming and fatiguing. For this materials with furigana are a blessing. About Spanish, I honestly wouldn't know how to advice. There are many students of this language on this forum, so I don't believe you'll have much trouble obtaining recommendations. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| roberto7 Newbie Joined 4229 days ago 25 posts - 27 votes Studies: English | Message 22 of 36 04 May 2013 at 1:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello!
I'm new here! I found this amazing topic is more than perfect to post my question than to open new one and thanks to Paco, Juan, Elexi. Expugnator and emk I found a lot of textbooks that would be useful for my "hopefully" coming languages! I just wonder about the same amazing textbooks but now for English language? I need to study it urgently and I need your recommendation for it? Sorry for my bad English and sorry for interrupting you. Edited by roberto7 on 04 May 2013 at 2:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4283 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 23 of 36 04 May 2013 at 9:36am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you emk. It looks brilliant, and the whole series seems to be the French
counterpart of the In Use series published by Cambridge, for they have the same format and are both graded according to the CEFR. roberto7, Welcome to the forum. Please feel free to raise questions and give a hand to others. As you can read and write English, I would suggest you polish it up with the In Use series published by Cambridge. The series include books on grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. The format is excellent: explanation on the left hand page and exercises on the right. You might want to firstly use the Vocabulary in Use books in conjunction with the Grammar in Use books, which are good companions to build a solid foundation. You might then want to turn to other vocabulary books, such as Phrasal Verbs, Collocation, Idioms and others. I have not used the Pronunciation books myself, so I cannot comment on them. But please bear in mind they are just textbooks - a guided introduction to grammar and short-cut to vocabulary acquisition. While using the series, you could also start reading graded readers, which are good for natural vocabulary growth. I know of two collections of them, which are Cambridge English Readers and Oxford Bookworms Library/Collection. In Use Cambridge English Readers Oxford Bookworms Library If there are libraries around, you should better browse through their catalogues, as you would possibly have access to all these books. Would you mind filling in your profile as well? I am sure other members would like to know about you. Paco Juan, As for the 4 main volumes, though there are some translations exercises which are not any useful to you, they are never the main course. All other parts are in Japanese; Chinese are just bonus, which you can ignore without loss. If you can read Japanese, you can read the whole series (except the translation exercises of course). Furigana will also be helpful to me. I saw you opened a thread about pronunciation of Kanji. Same Kanji with different pronunciations... I think I will go into the same trouble too. I am always amazed by people not from East Asia learning our languages. Conjugation and the likes are definitely difficult to us (I mean Chinese people; might be less for Japanese and Korean), but can still be slowly internalised by repetitive exposure. But you have to remember the strokes by rote learning. By the way, I am afraid I will have to open a new thread to catch attention for Spanish ;) Paco Edited by Paco on 04 May 2013 at 10:16am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| roberto7 Newbie Joined 4229 days ago 25 posts - 27 votes Studies: English | Message 24 of 36 04 May 2013 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you Paco!
but I want a complete textbook I didn't like In Use series for lacking conversation's audio, It's all about some words and some grammar points, my main goal now is to get to know to grammar , vocabulary and conversations through one series of textbooks (e.g. like optimal, Aspekte series for German), I need textbooks that lead me from A1-C2 And I'll accompanied it with graded readers, I like them very much so thanks for your recommendations about readers. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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