DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian
| Message 1 of 9 21 January 2015 at 12:50pm | IP Logged |
Teach Yourself produce a lot of courses for a wide range of languages. In general, the courses are decent, but you’ll nearly always find a better course produced by a language specific publisher. The quality of their courses vary a bit, so they can’t all be lumped into together
If I was to select the best, I’d go with,
Teach Yourself Complete Spanish – This may be skewed by the fact it was my second ever TY course.
Other contenders I liked were,
TY Beginners Russian
TY Complete Russian
TY Complete Bulgarian – Some dialogues aren’t recorded though.
The following are good courses, but had some issues,
TY Complete Hungarian – Audio didn’t quite align in some dialogues. Pace seems to go to fast after lesson 7.
TY Complete Danish – Lack of information on the pronunciation.
TY Complete French – Some CD quality issues, perhaps due to a bad copy of the CD.
TY Complete Polish – A bit too much English on the recordings.
The following courses I didn’t like,
TY Perfect Your Spanish – Ridiculous amount of English on the audio.
TY Perfect Your French – Also a ridiculous amount of English on the audio.
In your opinion, what are the best TY courses you’ve used ?
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 2 of 9 21 January 2015 at 5:25pm | IP Logged |
TY Estonian.
See also this thread for related discussion.
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Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5166 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian
| Message 3 of 9 21 January 2015 at 6:53pm | IP Logged |
They say Teach Yourself Hindi is among the best. I own Teach Yourself Nepali and it isn't that bad for a TY book. They explain the writing system well and not in a rush.
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day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3892 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English
| Message 4 of 9 22 January 2015 at 6:51pm | IP Logged |
Yes, that Snell guy who made TY Hindi is good. I especially enjoyed TY Speak Hindi With Confidence CDS, they are so much above TY Speak Swedish with Confidence and suchlike courses.
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luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 5 of 9 22 January 2015 at 10:13pm | IP Logged |
TY Esperanto - 3rd edition (1987) - there is also a cassette of the dialogues.
If you know the edition or publication date of the TY you like, please add that.
Edited by luke on 22 January 2015 at 10:14pm
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Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4749 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish
| Message 6 of 9 23 January 2015 at 8:07pm | IP Logged |
TY Hindi is great
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 7 of 9 24 January 2015 at 3:11am | IP Logged |
I used the Finnish one years ago, to activate my knowledge when I already knew all the grammar and a lot of vocab. I went through all the tasks once, then I sliced it into many files, one dialogue or text per file (I kept some English cues). And I did shadowing. The recordings were pretty good - not enough to get decent listening skills, but very suitable for learning to speak.
It was fine for my purposes but the grammar presentation didn't seem very well structured and clear. But it's still in my top5 Finnish courses I'd say, and most of them aren't English-based.
Edited by Serpent on 24 January 2015 at 3:14am
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day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3892 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English
| Message 8 of 9 24 January 2015 at 2:45pm | IP Logged |
As to TY Hindi and editions by Snell, there was one from the 80ies (?) which is regarded as better than the later one (90ies and up, the one with a love story, i believe it's still the same book that's being cold as "Complete" course). I also find his other TY courses good.
Colloquial Hindi (Bhatia) is also among my favorites, even though I am not too into TY/Colloquial books and usually try to avoid them.
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