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Colloquial Hebrew? | ||
Tags: Colloquial (program) | Hebrew | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| cmmah Diglot Groupie Ireland Joined 4330 days ago 52 posts - 110 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Irish | Message 1 of 4 18 September 2012 at 7:46pm | IP Logged |
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Has anyone ever used Colloquial Hebrew (or any of the "Colloquial" series). There's some good reviews for it on
Amazon, but I want to make sure before I jump in and buy it. -What are the good/bad points? -Are there better courses out there? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4438 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 2 of 4 19 September 2012 at 10:49am | IP Logged |
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I have not used Colloquial Hebrew, but currently I use Colloquial Russian, which I like as it fits my way of studying. The quality of the Colloquial series may vary as there are different authors for each language. However, they seem to have the following in common:
- A relatively classical approach to language learning. Each chapter normally consists of a longish text, a dialogue, grammar points and exercises. - They progress qucikly, and you will get a lot of new vocabulary in each chapter, and new grammar is also introduced at quick speed. For me this works fine, but it means that I every now and then go back and review earlier chapters to refersh vocabulary and grammar points. - The accompanying audio material does not include all the text in the book, and, at least for Russian, there is a lot of English spoken. So in this respect I prefer Assimil for listening comprehension. From the preview in Amazon it seems that Colloquial Hebrew is built up pretty much in this way (even the "main character" has the same name as in the Russian course, Peter Green.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| boon Diglot Groupie Ireland Joined 5958 days ago 91 posts - 177 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Mandarin, Latin | Message 3 of 4 20 September 2012 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
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Hmm, I can give you a fellow-Irish perspective on the course lol.
I was planning to go to Israel, so I bought the course. In the end I didn't go. It was a couple of years ago when I got it, but back then at any rate, there were very few resources for Hebrew. Obviously there's the FSI course which can be downloaded for free. It's very detailed, and a little too slow- moving. But it's free so it's worth a look. You could focus on the audio and skim through the detailed PDFs. I didn't use it a whole lot. I worked through about four or five chapters of the Colloquial course. It was fairly pleasant to use. The audio was okay but had some pointless background sound effects, too much English and some of the dialogues were really boring. The book was a little bit "modern". It was a bit dumbed-down in places, a bit too much like a phrase book (incidentally I have a Lonely Planet Hebrew phrasebook, which, ridiculously, doesn't indicate which syllable to stress). This YouTube link about the Colloquial series should be enlightening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqi842UTO0w I would say it's worth a buy unless you want to save money by sticking to online resources. Maybe nowadays there are some other books I don't know about. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4643 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 4 of 4 21 September 2012 at 6:20pm | IP Logged |
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I have used Colloquial Icelandic and I was very pleased with the course. Grammar explanations are not always absolutely exhaustive and I couldn't see the purpose of some exercises, but the dialogues and texts were interesting and well written. I think the biggest problem of the Colloquial series might be the audio material as there is a lot of English instructions and exercises on the recordings. Not all dialogues have been recorded, so this is a minus.
Generally, the course is well designed and grammar is presented sensibly step by step. Another minus might be that the vocabulary lists which accompany the dialogues only contain the most important words. Other words have to be looked up in the glossary at the end of the book. I have now bought Colloquial Japanese and will buy Colloquial Russian 2 in the near future, because I really think it's a good series. I can't compare it to Assimil or the likes, but I would recommend Colloquial. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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