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Review: Linguaphone Conversational Course | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5455 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 1 of 1 29 July 2012 at 2:54pm | IP Logged |
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I’ve been working my way through an old Linguaphone French Conversational Course out of curiosity, and I liked
it. The books contain no publication date, but in one of them there’s a list of Linguaphone Institutes around the world. Since one of them is located in the Irish Free State, the course must be from the 1920s or 30s. I’ve only got two books: the text book, Cours de Conversation: Français, and the accompanying Explanatory Notes on the French Conversational Course. I suspect that there should be at least one more book with vocabulary lists and a grammar book, but I’don’t have them, and I’m not sure that there are more than the two books I’ve got. I don’t have the audio either (16 records). The course contains 30 lessons. Each of them is divided into two parts, first an introductory text about a page long, then a conversation. The textbook is entirely in French. There are many drawings with illustrations of new words. The other book contains grammar notes and explanations. According to the preface, the records contain recordings of all the lessons entirely in French. There’s no complete phonetic transcription of the lessons (you’re supposed to listen to the records), and there’s no complete translation in English either. In other words, it is very similar in format to the later Linguaphone courses from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. There’s a separate “sounds record” where you can listen carefully to French vowels and consonants and contrast them. There is a phonetic transcription of this record in the textbook. Instead of some annoying, inconsistent, home-made phonetic script, like the ones you’ll find in Assimil books, Linguaphone chose to use IPA. That’s not surprising, however, when one of the voices on the recordings belonged to Paul Passy, the president of the International Phonetic Association at the time. If you’re not familiar with grammatical terminology, you’ll struggle with some the explanatory notes. The course takes for granted that you’re familiar with sentence analysis and grammar terms. This is where the course feels a bit dated. Although the method and format is basically the same as in the newer Linguaphone courses, the authors seem to really enjoy throwing grammar terms at you. When it comes to vocabulary, I was positively surprised. For such a short course, it is surprisingly large (I haven’t counted the number of words though). And for such an old course, it is surprisingly modern. I’d say the course feels much less dated than Cortina or Berlitz Self-Teacher. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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