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Rocket languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| polyglossic Newbie United States polyglossic.wordpres Joined 4137 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French, Ancient Greek, Portuguese | Message 1 of 11 05 August 2013 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hello everyone,
I'm new to these forums but not new to language learning. (I just got my MA in Applied Linguistics.) However, most of my "independent" language learning has been at least kick-started by a formal language class and then supplemented by various materials I can get my hands on. I just booked tickets for three weeks in Brazil, and I have about three months to study Portuguese, which I'll be starting from absolute scratch - I don't even know any Spanish to give me a little boost. I'm pretty excited to get to try all of the independent language programs that I've read about here and elsewhere but never had the opportunity to test myself. There was a short article in Travel and Leisure this month where the author tried a bunch of different products to teach himself Italian. Most of them I was familiar with already, but he mentioned one I'd never heard of - Rocket Languages. http://www.rocketlanguages.com/ The website looks pretty promising but the price seems a little steep to me ($99). Has anyone had any experience with this program? Would you recommend it? Is it that much more valuable than other online programs that are free or much cheaper? (i.e. LiveMocha or Babbel) I'd appreciate any thoughts! Thanks! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6937 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes  Studies: Uzbek | Message 2 of 11 05 August 2013 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'll happily defer to others with other recommendations, but I think you could accomplish a lot in Brazilian Portuguese by using the free on-line FSI course
http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Portuguese% 20Programmatic and the even more extensive DLI basic or headstart courses: http://jlu.wbtrain.com/sumtotal/language/DLI%20basic%20cours es/Portuguese/ Edited by daristani on 05 August 2013 at 7:55pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 4983 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 11 05 August 2013 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
First post ... link to rocket languages...first thoughts: SUSPICIOUS! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5055 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 11 05 August 2013 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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First, welcome to the forum! It's good to see you are willing to embrace a non-academic approach to language learning. It really depends on what your goals may be. There's nothing wrong with learnign a language at a very basic level and you don't have to spend $99 to do it.
If you want to order food and drinks, deal with shopping, ask directions, talk about yourself and have basic conversations etc- the 90 lesson Pimsleur course could be done in that time at one half an hour lesson a day. If your library doesn't have it, ask for an inter-library loan. Combine that with the DLI course at 2 lessons a week, for 24 lessons, and you could have a fun and interesting time in Brazil using Portuguese to help you have a better experience as a traveler. There's very little English spoken outside the major tourist areas. As someone who has traveled in Brazil, I can tell you that it would be a good idea, given your lead time, to learn as much functional Portuguese as you can. Edited by iguanamon on 05 August 2013 at 9:27pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| polyglossic Newbie United States polyglossic.wordpres Joined 4137 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French, Ancient Greek, Portuguese | Message 5 of 11 05 August 2013 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hmm...I don't know what's suspicious about asking for feedback on a program I've never seen before, especially when I mention several others that I'm trying as well? I thought this was a forum for asking questions about language programs... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| polyglossic Newbie United States polyglossic.wordpres Joined 4137 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French, Ancient Greek, Portuguese | Message 6 of 11 05 August 2013 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for the welcome! I have definitely looked at the FSI materials and I'm willing to try pretty much anything. Rocket Languages seems to have a lot more bells & whistles a la Rosetta Stone, and I'm just wondering if the fun and games might be a good supplement to the meatier FSI material or if it's a little silly. I've just started using LiveMocha...like, as of yesterday :) so maybe I don't need any more fun and games? Obviously everyone learns differently but I was just curious to see if anyone had tried it yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6496 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 11 06 August 2013 at 10:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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The moderators are constantly monitoring the site for commercial spam, and we remove a lot of new members' first messages with more or less glowing recommandations of paid learning sites - and also spam with absolutely no relation to language learning (such as a commercial for shoes, for instance!). And this may of course also hit people who genuinely seek opinions about offers they may or may not want to pay for. But you can't really say that Polyglossic recommends that Rocket-thing when the first thing that is mentioned in the message is the steep price and the next thing is a couple of cheaper or free alternatives. Personally I wouldn't even consider paying 99 $ for an online language course unless I couldn't see any alternatives - and with Portuguese there definitely must be cheaper options.
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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