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Opinions on Living Language Ultimate | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Malcolm Triglot Retired Moderator Senior Member Korea, South Joined 7102 days ago 500 posts - 515 votes  5 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 9 of 9 10 July 2006 at 4:05pm | IP Logged |
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Aside from the Mandarin course mentioned above, I've also used the "Basic-Intermediate" volume of Living Language Ultimate Japanese and Portuguese, and the "Advanced" volume of Spanish. These courses come with tons of audio, but I didn't find any of the non-dialogue audio to be particularly useful. I usually edit the audio down to just the dialogues, which ends up being less than an hour in length. I then shadow the dialogues as I would with an Assimil, Teach Yourself, or Colloquial course. Here's my assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the LLU series over the other three mentioned above:
Pros: -Dialogues stay at a consistent speed throughout. That is, they don't start super slow and then speed up later as they do in Assimil courses. -Advanced volumes are available in all but three of the languages (Portuguese, Mandarin, and Arabic) -Contains a good amount of vocabulary (but not as much as in Assimil, unless you count the LLU advanced volume. But then again, Assimil also has advanced volumes and would probably contain a little more vocab overall. This depends on the language of course.) Cons: -Too much wasted audio on the 8 CDs (for my purposes, at least) -Not available for very many languages. -Doesn't always introduce the most useful vocabulary first. -The speakers sometimes have "bad" accents, or at least accents that differ from the other speakers. -For Chinese and Japanese: very weak on characters. In conclusion, for the few languages that are available, LLU is probably a little better than TY and Colloquial, but probably a little worse than Assimil. However, not very many Assimil courses are available in English, and not all of us can read French. Of course, it's a good idea to use several different dialogue-based courses in conjunction (they essentially function together as one giant dialogue-based course with tons of audio), so LLU is worthwhile regardless. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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