21 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3
dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 17 of 21 14 June 2014 at 8:52pm | IP Logged |
DaraghM wrote:
I purchased the new French edition, and the amount of audio is incredible. It says ten
hours but when I extracted the disk it came to nearly 13 hours. I've listened to the
first couple of units and nearly all the vocabulary is on the recording. This means the
audio material covers at least 12,000 terms. I was initially concerned the audio was
computer generated, but it is actual live recordings. The other big surprise is the cost.
It seems incredibly cheap for the book never mind the recordings. |
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Is this just vocabulary or is it meaningful sentences? 12,000 words in 13 hours is
roughly one word every four seconds. I can believe that if it's a stream of words. If
it's meaningful sentences, then I'm more than a little surprised.
1 person has voted this message useful
| BrianDeAlabama Groupie United States Joined 4519 days ago 89 posts - 113 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 18 of 21 16 June 2014 at 8:35am | IP Logged |
brian032 wrote:
Has anyone purchased the Spanish version yet? I wonder what accent they use in the audio. I've
tried
looking for audio samples, but it seems like a lost cause. |
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I bought the Spanish a few months back and I want to say that it sounds like they have a variety of Spanish accents
but the Spain is definitely there. The Spaniard accent doesn't come in handy in many parts of the United States
unless you watch Spanish media or television and then I bet it would really help out the student.
I can not make up my mind when I want to start studying the book after I finish Assimil's Spanish with Ease or after
I finnish both Asimil with Ease & Using Spanish.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German
| Message 19 of 21 16 June 2014 at 10:36am | IP Logged |
dampingwire wrote:
Is this just vocabulary or is it meaningful sentences? 12,000 words in 13 hours is
roughly one word every four seconds. I can believe that if it's a stream of words. If
it's meaningful sentences, then I'm more than a little surprised.
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Sadly, it is just lists of vocabulary. The only saving grace is that the vocabulary
are in thematic lists. But if you want it for audio-only learning, it's pretty
useless.
luke wrote:
I found this at the bookstore today. I didn't buy it, but I'm wondering
if anyone who has can provide a further update. Has it been something you could stick
with? How has it been useful? |
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There are a lot of these books with large topical vocabulary lists. The fact that it
has audio gives it an advantage over the other offerings, especially since it still
costs the same or less as other similar books without audio.
Personally, I haven't used it very much. I am learning vocab from the Routledge
Frequency Dictionary, although it has several drawbacks (the most important, it only
gives the masculine form of adjectives). I think learning by frequency is more useful
for general purposes than thematic lists. But once I've learned over 2500 frequency
words, I might turn to the Barron's book and find topics of particular interest to me.
It was relatively cheap on amazon.co.uk, so I don't regret buying it. But right now
it's just taking up space on my shelf.
Where I think this book could be useful is if you want to read in a certain topic.
Let's say you are planning to get a job in France, then you could learn the section on
business vocabulary. If that job is going to be in informatics, then you can learn the
vocabulary from that section as well. In other words, if you have very specific
vocabulary needs, then a book like this would be very useful. And since this one comes
with free audio, then Barron's is the obvious choice.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 20 of 21 26 December 2014 at 1:22am | IP Logged |
I wonder if this would be good for intermediate ADD types who don't want to commit to a whole book and like
to dip in and out of things.
1 person has voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 21 of 21 11 January 2015 at 4:13am | IP Logged |
So I did break down and pay full retail price for this book/mp3 CD at the bookstore, rather than the usual discount through Amazon. That was this morning. A lot of the words are cognates and other words I already know or have heard. I read the first section and listened to the first track in the car. The tracks look to be about 5 minutes long on average, which is a nice length. I'd rather have a dialog using all these words like Assimil, but even at full price, this seems like a good deal (if I continue to use it).
My idea is to look through a section before I get on the road, then listen to the words. I'm hoping I can start making up thoughts in my head based on the words, but that remains to be seen.
One thing I think may be helpful, I haven't seen a lot of the cognates like orpheline, (orphan) before. Looking through the unit and hearing the words seems like it will demystify a bunch of words before I meet them "in the wild".
2 persons have voted this message useful
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