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MT, Pimsleur... What next? | ||
Tags: Audio-lingual | Language Program | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5195 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian | Message 1 of 7 17 July 2011 at 4:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Looking for all-audio, make-you-think courses. I can't go back to hitting the books... Any suggestions?
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| nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5195 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian | Message 2 of 7 18 July 2011 at 8:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Maybe a little further explanation...
MT and Pimsleur (I've only listened to the latter a little) are good in their own ways, but I do think they rely WAY too much on English. What I would really like is a program that is primarily a collection of recordings in the target language followed by questions and answers in the target language. Does anyone know of anything like this? The all-audio or mostly-audio aspect is very important to me because I am much more interested in speaking and listening than reading and writing. I study reading and writing with teachers and in classes, but find it hard to do so when studying independently. Also, I like to run while practicing languages... difficult to do with a book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5564 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 3 of 7 18 July 2011 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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To my knowledge there is very little like this - here are some suggestions from materials I have:
FSI - You can do the listen and repeat exercises for the dialogue and the substitution drills without the text. Probably best to read the text first though. Linguaphone All Talk is a combination of a dialogue course with grammar and vocabulary lectures. Not very good really as it is a traditional Linguaphone 'book' course but without the book (and it suffers for it). The 80s and 90s iteration of the Linguaphone full courses contain about 6 minutes of dialogue to listen to and then about 7 minutes of listen and repeat exercises and substitution drills per lesson (30 lessons in all). These are the ones that come with 9 cassettes, the 70s earlier versions of the same course (4 cassettes) lack the substitution drills. Again, without fully reading and absorbing the dialogue via the text and grammar notes you are not going to get very far. the Learn in Your Car series - but it is a English - Target Language response method and you say you don't like this. The same is true of the Teach Yourself audio only CD courses - Speak .... with Confidence and Phone ...... 1920-1930s Linguaphone courses had a structure of the lesson being divided into a themeatic monologue - then a question and answer session on the monologue- but no gap for you to give the answer (but a sound editor like Reaper or Audacity can do this). Trouble is - 78s, outmoded language, very hard to get. The Cortina Master Linguist course works on a listen and repeat basis - i.e. a portion of the dialogue is read out and there is a space for you to repeat it. Cortina is outmoded, however, and, whilst good in overall design, has shown its age worse than Assimil or Linguaphone. Edited by Elexi on 18 July 2011 at 12:55pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5129 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 4 of 7 18 July 2011 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||
There are many courses out there that have both audio and text. There's nothing wrong with using a combination. In fact, one of the languages you have listed as "learning" (Modern Standard Arabic) won't do you much good without some form of written instruction. The Teach Yourself series, Assimil series or the aforementioned FSI series are all good places to start. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 7 18 July 2011 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | ||
The first problem with this approach is that it's very difficult to ask a question that elicits a single particular answer. The second problem is that the language ends up very unnatural. Question: in your native language, how many questions do you answer in full sentences? Answer: almost none. If the primary means of eliciting target language is a target-language question, you either don't produce full sentences, or you produce unnatural language. Neither of these is a brilliant strategy. PS. I think your problem isn't the "all-audio" bit, but the "make you think" bit. Books can make you think too -- the problem with many books is that they let you do exercises in a "mechanical" matter: you churn through the rule without thinking about what the sentence actually means. It's a common failing in many courses, but it isn't a problem specific to paper.... Edited by Cainntear on 18 July 2011 at 3:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nebojats Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5195 days ago 89 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Italian | Message 6 of 7 18 July 2011 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey thanks all for the responses. I first want to say that I just finished discussing this dilemma with my mom
(she's a language instructor) and she just sort of guided me to the conclusion that it would be very difficult to eliminate the language of instruction from all-audio courses (ie English in MT) becaus of the nature of the medium. My best language learning has been by myself or in small groups with an instructor speaking almost entirely in the target language. In person there are all sorts of visual and contextual clues that allow the instructor to avoid direct translation (I also do this as an English tutor and teacher) but in a recording there are very few clues that can be given. So perhaps keeping the language of instruction is unavoidable. @alexi: thanks for describing all those resources! Oftentimes it seems ridiculously hard to get an impression of how different programs actually work, and your explanations give me a better idea. Of the ones you listed, the 1920s and 1930s linguaphone seem the best, because it seems like exactly what I am seeking... A recording followed by question/answer period. Also, the in-car chinese and teach yourself sound cool (especially given the discussion I just had with my mom). @hrhenry: I've started looking into getting an assimil course. They provide lots of recordings with native speakers, no? Maybe I could do some sort of shadowing technique while I run and then make the time to do a little book work later. I seem to recall that assimil encourages some sort of 'passive' stage so maybethat could work out well. Also, I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with combining audio and text... I'm simply saying I would prefer a higher audio-to-text ratio, dig? :) another thing, I have Arabic (Written) listed in my profile because this forum still doesn't have an option for Maghrebi Arabic or Darija. @cainntear: good points and I definitely agree that there isn't a shortage of audio but there is a shortage of audio that makes me think. I am okay with slightly stilted full-sentence response though. I was taught Thai with the Peace Corps, no English was used and we were always made to reply in full sentence answers. This helped us to understand sentence structures and grammar I think, and of course once we were outside of the actual language sessions we picked up quicker, more efficient, and more natural ways of responding. I still think it was nice to speak in full sentences during the instruction sessions though. The problem which I think would be bigger is precisely as you say... How do you elicit a single answer? In the context of peace corps trainig, that was no problem, given contextual clues ( instructor points at cat, says, 'what color is the cat?' or 'what is the cat doing?'). In all-audio, the question/answers would have to VERY carefully be laid out so that certain answers would obviously be expected. Maybe something like: 'John is happy because he is eating his favorite ice cream.' 'is John happy or sad?' 'is John eating or drinking?' 'what is John eating?' 'is John eating ice cream or a burger?' 'does John like eating burgers?' Something like that followed with space to answer followed by a native speaker replying for you to heck your answer against. Nothing exists like this that I'm aware of. The other problem would be of course that you couldn't ASK questions, only ANSWER. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| roadrunner Newbie United States secretstoimprovememo Joined 7162 days ago 15 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian | Message 7 of 7 20 July 2011 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Maybe just listening to the audio portion of Assimil would be a good follow up to Pimsleur. I've done this by putting all of the lessons on my iPod, and lust listening to the dialogues over and over when I don't have the book with me. The number of words you learn from Assimil far exceeds Pimsleur, so I believe it might be a good next step after Pims.
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