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How can you trust a language course? | ||
Tags: Textbooks | Language Program | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5535 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 9 of 15 06 May 2011 at 3:45pm | IP Logged |
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As several have noted, any course will have *some* mistakes. The best option is to use multiple sources since this will make errors more obvious when several sources agree but one does not. However, also keep in mind that sometimes that even those differences may not be mistakes, but rather different ways of wording those same concepts and thus both may be correct. In that case, though, you should be able to find *some* source that agrees with the minority occurrence if it is, indeed, a legitimate one.
It's really interesting to go back through a course you completed long ago (like I'm doing with Pimsleur Korean) and finding mistakes that you had no way of noticing the first time through (and I have found a few in Pimsleur Korean, though most of those are really more "oversimplified" than flat out wrong). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Akao aka FailArtist Senior Member United States Joined 5336 days ago 315 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Toki Pona | Message 10 of 15 06 May 2011 at 5:59pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks everyone! I'll keep my eye open for that.
On that note, I have teach yourself Swedish, what other course would you recommend? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 15 07 May 2011 at 12:54am | IP Logged |
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What's even more intesting - try explaining parts of your language to a beginning or low intermediate student. You'll most likely notice how you fall back to using sentences that might be correct, but aren't how you would actually speak yourself most of the time. Textbooks do the same.
Just something I noticed today is that our English textbook (kind of a joke, really) has exercises that mix up idiomatic phrasal verbs and regular verbs that can be used with different prepositions. It may be just me, but the way I learn those two is completely different (lexical vs grammatical) and those exercises would confuse me to no end if I didn't already know the words. Edited by Bao on 07 May 2011 at 10:27pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| pfn123 Senior Member Australia Joined 5083 days ago 171 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English* | Message 12 of 15 07 May 2011 at 11:41am | IP Logged |
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You CAN trust the textbook... The question is, how can you trust me when I tell you you can trust the textbook :P
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| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6650 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 13 of 15 08 May 2011 at 3:09am | IP Logged |
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I tend to trust more the courses and books that have multiple native speakers recorded
speaking the exact sentences and phrases that are written in the texts. The more speakers and sentences there are, the more comfortable I am with using it. I have become very wary of text-only courses, grammars, phrasebooks, etc., and tend to use them more as reference. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 14 of 15 08 May 2011 at 4:29am | IP Logged |
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That's the danger of relying on a single source. I always use various sources in parallel.
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| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6125 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 15 of 15 08 May 2011 at 7:36am | IP Logged |
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I just don't worry about it. If there are mistakes, I just figure I'll fix it later.
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