Z. Marina Newbie United States Joined 4979 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin
| Message 1 of 5 10 April 2011 at 12:02am | IP Logged |
I'm trying to learn Russian, Egyptian Arabic, and some other languages. I'm looking for a solid, reasonably priced language learning program that can teach me these. It doesn't have to be very fast; I have all the time in the world. Is other any one program that can teach me Russian and/or any other language effectively and without destroying my bank account? The pricing should not exceed $500 USD.
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Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7122 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian
| Message 2 of 5 10 April 2011 at 12:41am | IP Logged |
There is no way you'd need to spend anything like that!
I recommend 'Living Language Ultimate Russian', both volumes. They come with audio.
You can also get free courses from the FSI site and the Princeton Russian Course is free too!
As for Arabic, I've never studied it, so I'll leave that recommendation to someone else.
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patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7016 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map
| Message 3 of 5 10 April 2011 at 2:30am | IP Logged |
The Linguaphone Arabic course costs less than $500 (not by much, though!). Throw in an alphabet-learning book and you're all set.
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 4 of 5 10 April 2011 at 2:48am | IP Logged |
Z. Marina wrote:
I'm trying to learn Russian, Egyptian Arabic, and some other languages. I'm looking for a solid, reasonably priced language learning program that can teach me these. It doesn't have to be very fast; I have all the time in the world. Is other any one program that can teach me Russian and/or any other language effectively and without destroying my bank account? The pricing should not exceed $500 USD. |
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If you're willing to spend 500 bucks on language learning, you probably shouldn't spend it all on a single program. No single program will get you to where you want to be anyway.
I would start with an audio-only program, such as Michel Thomas or Pimsleur. They're available for both your languages. Michel Thomas is quite reasonably priced. Pimsleur is expensive, but you most likely can find it at your library. And if you do feel like spending money on Pimsleur, go for the downloadable MP3 version - it's about a third of the CD course price.
After that, I'd go with something like Teach Yourself or Assimil. They're both very affordable. And they'll give you more listening and speaking practice, as well as reading and writing.
R.
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Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7122 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian
| Message 5 of 5 10 April 2011 at 3:08am | IP Logged |
There's a used Linguaphone currently going on Amazon for $122.93 if you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0828840512/ref=dp_olp _used?ie=UTF8&condition=used
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