11 messages over 2 pages: 1 2
tmp011007
Diglot
Senior Member
Congo
Joined 6072 days ago
199 posts - 346 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English
Studies: French, Portuguese
| Message 9 of 11 04 February 2011 at 5:19pm | IP Logged |
Cammela wrote:
| What do you think about Strokes? |
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let's see:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=18785&PN=21 wrote:
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schoenewaelder wrote:
I've only perused it rather than made any serious use, but to me it looks like "Talk to me" which was a sort of basic version of "Tell me more".
There's a dialog of five or six sentences, you can listen to each individually, or word by word. There are vocab and grammar exercises and you can record your voice. I'm sure it's much cheaper in the shops than on their website.
The demo on their website gives quite a good indication. Personally, I find the interface looks at least ten years old, but it seems to work ok.
Minor personal obessive compulsive quibbles:
it siezes hold of the whole screen, so you need to use alt-tab to switch to other programmes, but for some reason all language programmes seem to do that (don't they understand the purpose of "windows"?)
it tries to hide its audio data in .dll files (but you can still import them "raw" into audacity if you want.
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Cainntear wrote:
Just going through the demo on the web.
To me it looks pretty standard. The dialogue exercises are a straightforward reworking of the Transparent Language methodology, which is 20 years old (see this review of language software from 1991 and I've never liked.
Beyond that, it's just standard multimedia exercises -- drag-and-drop word matching, gap fill etc.
The drag-and-drop matching looks pointless (as always). First up, why do I need to drag when I could just click? The vocabulary is given a word at a time, so I'm only choosing one item, the translation. But more importantly, there is no real pattern to the words presented -- it is simply the words used in the lesson.
The example given uses the following (in English for speakers of German)
and (und)
how (vie)
really (wirklich)
nice (schön)
thanks (danke)
you (du)
hello (hallo)
from (aus)
not (nicht)
name (Name)
meet (kennen lernen)
your (dein)
If the obvious ones aren't a waste of time, then the non-obvious ones might be too difficult. Also the massive difference between the meanings of the words means you can do the exercise without being sure of the answer. I'm unlikely to confuse "hello" with "meet" in any language, and if I do after you attempted to teach me them both then you're clearly not teaching me right!
I'm also concerned by any course that can present "Do you have a flu?" as real English. I'd say "the flu", and others would just say "flu", but I'm not aware of any major dialect where you'd say "a flu".
Even if the methodology or the technology was any good (and it doesn't look like it to me), poor quality control on the language itself is unforgivable.
Then of course I'm pretty certain that like most other software packages, it's what I call "template teaching" -- have a template for the dialogues and translate all languages to fit it, ignoring the relative difficulty of certain language combinations. What's easy to do when learning English from German will be difficult to do when learning Arabic from English, French from Chinese, etc. |
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http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=18785&PN=21
now my opinion based on 3 test lessons downloaded from
http://www.strokes-international.com/info/Download-Software. html :
schoenewaelder was right: it's sort of basic version of "TellMeMore" xD
1 person has voted this message useful
| Cammela
Tetraglot
Newbie
Senegal
Joined 5056 days ago
28 posts - 31 votes
Speaks: French*, ItalianC2, Spanish, GermanB2
| Message 10 of 11 04 February 2011 at 11:11pm | IP Logged |
// schoenewaelder was right: it's sort of basic version of "TellMeMore" xD
I think you don't know what you're talking about;-),
I have tried tell me more and - beyond a rasonable doubt - Strokes is completely different, it's more like a multimedia version of assimil.
I bet you a beer that using only strokes and original material/skype(after lesson 200) you get to C1 level;-)
Edited by Cammela on 04 February 2011 at 11:13pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| tmp011007
Diglot
Senior Member
Congo
Joined 6072 days ago
199 posts - 346 votes
Speaks: Spanish*, English
Studies: French, Portuguese
| Message 11 of 11 05 February 2011 at 12:23am | IP Logged |
Cammela wrote:
// schoenewaelder was right: it's sort of basic version of "TellMeMore" xD
I think you don't know what you're talking about;-),
I have tried tell me more and - beyond a rasonable doubt - Strokes is completely different, it's more like a multimedia version of assimil.
I bet you a beer that using only strokes and original material/skype(after lesson 200) you get to C1 level;-)
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fair enough... just two things:
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tmp011007 wrote:
...my opinion based on 3 test lessons downloaded from...
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2. just one beer? or you are an abstinent or aren't that sure xD
1 person has voted this message useful
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