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Hardest Language Courses ? | ||
Tags: Language Program | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5938 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 7 21 February 2012 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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What language courses have you found very difficult ? Was it due to the language or the course itself ?
The ones I struggled with most were, Teach Yourself Hungarian - The Hungarian audio is spoken very quickly. The English interludes are spoken at a very reasonable pace which makes the Hungarian seem even faster. Colloquial Latvian by Christopher Moseley - This has some of the hardest audio I've ever heard. The course has a number of mistakes as well. Assimil - Using Spanish - The translations on this course are appalling. In the end I just ignored the English. Living Language Ultimate Russian - There was nothing especially tricky about the course, but I didn't absorb the material. I think I found it too repetitive. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| zekecoma Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5131 days ago 561 posts - 655 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 2 of 7 21 February 2012 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | ||
Also, it doesn't have stress marks either. So it's useless from the start. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6943 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 7 21 February 2012 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Colloquial Estonian - Christopher Moseley laid another egg with this one by designing this course so that users would be frustrated by the exercises that expect you to know things that are introduced in later chapters only. This one is a good bet to make you hate Estonian if it's your only course.
Teach Yourself Lithuanian - For a modern edition in the "Teach Yourself" series, this one resembles the old ones with chapters bearing long lists of vocabulary; much of which is not used in the relevant chapters. It also doesn't provide that many exercises relative to the amount of grammar taught and even the deliberately slow and clear speech on the CDs will wear your patience (and set you up for a nasty shock when having to deal with fluent speakers who speak at a normal clip let alone a fast one). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5711 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 5 of 7 21 February 2012 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Colloquial Finnish by Daniel Abondolo. He makes Finnish grammar far more complicated than it actually is. After making Finnish grammar seem more like quantum physics than a language, he makes things even worse by having the dialogues present a confusing mix of both the formal and colloquial registers of speech. Small wonder that I almost gave up on learning Finnish after attempting to work through six or seven chapters of this course. Edited by mick33 on 21 February 2012 at 9:32pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5938 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 6 of 7 22 February 2012 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I should also add Berlitz Essential Russian to the list. The course starts out gently enough but introduces all noun cases together in Chapter 5.
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| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5936 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 7 of 7 22 February 2012 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I second Chung's opinion on Colloquial Estonian. It also does not give enough cases of nouns to allow you to use them in practice - Estonian declensions are quite unpredictable. After using it, I was complimented on my pronunciation but could hardly say anything.
The all time worst I have ever come across is the old version of Teach Yourself Finnish. It makes the new one look like a masterpiece. It had over 100 words per lesson, but only a fraction were actually used. That series was all too light on practice material, but not usually as badly. Teach Yourself Arabic is also pretty bad. It goes the other way by introducing the grammar with a very small number of words and then suddenly jumping to real prose with advanced grammar and dozens of new words in each. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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