JCF Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6209 days ago 18 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Russian, German
| Message 1 of 5 28 March 2010 at 8:12pm | IP Logged |
I have been working my way through MT Italian, and I am wondering about whether or not the Italian Vocabulary course is worth my time. I can get it for free if I desire, but is it actually worth it to run through it? For people who have tried the vocab course: How many words do you think you learn? How well do you retain what you learn?
Thanks,
Peter
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Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5807 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 2 of 5 28 March 2010 at 11:24pm | IP Logged |
I'm not sure that they should have called it a "vocabulary" course -- it doesn't teach a lot of words, but more useful turns-of-phrase. It's hampered by wasting a lot of time on the cognates you already know from the other courses (-tion -> -zione etc) and this accounts for much of the actual vocabulary.
It's not as good as the genuine MT materials but there's definitely enough in there to be worthwhile. Not all of it will stick if you don't revise it later (there is some revision programmed in, but not as much as in the genuine MT courses) but you'll definitely get enough out of it to repay the investment of the cover price and a few hours study time, and if you can get it for free, it's a bargain!
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magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French
| Message 3 of 5 29 March 2010 at 1:38am | IP Logged |
One thing to note is that the woman who delivers the course is incredibily annoying. I've always found
people who
complain of such things to be petty and missing the point that behind the presentation there may be a
course worth following. In this case however, the woman is not just incredibly patronising but she can't even
pronounce words correctly - she often confuses word endings e's, i's etc
For free it's worth running through but I wouldn't waste money paying as the new words that are introduced
require for the most part rote memory on the listener's part.
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JCF Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6209 days ago 18 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Russian, German
| Message 4 of 5 30 March 2010 at 11:46pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the opinions. I figure I might as well just do it; no exposure to the language can really be bad, no?
Thanks
Peter
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magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French
| Message 5 of 5 30 March 2010 at 11:55pm | IP Logged |
Well, to add to my comment above, the format is slightly different in the voacb course
in that the two 'students' are in fact native speakers who do speak correctly and of
course never get things wrong. The problem is that the magic is gone from the original
courses. By that I mean you don't feel like you are moving along quickly, learning in
time with the others, rather that you are being forced fed word after word, phrase
after phrase that in the most part, are never returned to after their little section is
over with. The woman is annoying as I said, with comments (coming from a CD remember!)
such as 'well done' and 'great' after a pause for you to speak. How does she know what
you said? This never happened in the original MT courses.
I would definitely give it a go if is available to you as there is an elaboration on
forming more words using cognates and other similar tricks but I think this is the
point where care and attention went out of the window and a sloppyness and a 'I know
better' attitude on the part of the teacher takes over. In my opinion, you would learn
a lot of vocab in a more natural manner if you now tackled an Assimil course.
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