delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German
| Message 1 of 21 13 February 2009 at 8:13pm | IP Logged |
Has anyone ever used the Colloquial method and if so what have been your experiences and/or thoughts about the method?
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fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7174 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto
| Message 2 of 21 14 February 2009 at 3:06am | IP Logged |
I have the Colloquial courses for a number of languages. They differ from language to language. It was written elsewhere that Colloquial and Teach Yourself are similar. They are but for some languages one is much better than the other and for other languages it is the other way around.
I like them both, generally speaking. I have both Teach Yourself and Colloquial for several languages.
Which language are you considering?
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Rollo the Cat Groupie United States Joined 6062 days ago 77 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Russian, Ancient Greek
| Message 3 of 21 14 February 2009 at 7:37am | IP Logged |
I hated the Russian version. It was disordered.
Fanatic,
I assume you like the Colloquial Afrikaans book?
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delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German
| Message 4 of 21 14 February 2009 at 9:39am | IP Logged |
fanatic wrote:
I have the Colloquial courses for a number of languages. They differ from language to language. It was written elsewhere that Colloquial and Teach Yourself are similar. They are but for some languages one is much better than the other and for other languages it is the other way around.
I like them both, generally speaking. I have both Teach Yourself and Colloquial for several languages.
Which language are you considering? |
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I am considering Arabic and Persian in the near future and maybe some others later on but those are my main languages for right now. What for audio do the Colloquial series have? Is it any good?
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delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German
| Message 5 of 21 14 February 2009 at 9:41am | IP Logged |
Rollo the Cat wrote:
I hated the Russian version. It was disordered.
Fanatic,
I assume you like the Colloquial Afrikaans book?
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I haven't looked at Afrikaans yet, but I would like to pick it up sometime in the future.
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Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6168 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese
| Message 6 of 21 14 February 2009 at 11:28am | IP Logged |
The audio on the colloquial series tends to have far more English then the TY series, although there is significant
variety from language to language. As far as Arabic and Farsi are concerned, I've only got experience of the older
generation of the series (Persian by Leila Moshiri (1988)/ the Arabic books (Egyptian/Levatine/Gulf) were little
pocket books full of verb tables), I quite liked the Persian book despite the massive disadvantage of being entirely
in Romanised transliteration. I would recommended getting hold of the books via your library before spending
anything, because they can be very expensive and of dubious quality. (I can add Hindi, Urdu and Estonian to the list
of sub-standard Colloquial courses)
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delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German
| Message 7 of 21 14 February 2009 at 11:48am | IP Logged |
So for the Farsi and Arabic books they don't use the actual script?
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Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6168 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese
| Message 8 of 21 14 February 2009 at 12:44pm | IP Logged |
I don't think the Arabic courses use the Arabic script because they focus explicitly on the spoken vernaculars in
Egypt/ the Levant/ the Gulf, which are hardly ever written and it's easier to use roman transliteration to represent
them. On the other hand, TY Arabic uses script because it teaches MSA.
For the Farsi courses, the older course (ISBN 978-0415008860) is entirely romanised, but more in-depth then the
new generation of courses. It seems the newer course (ISBN 978-0415441988) does teach the script though.
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