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Teach Yourself are at it again | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4690 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 1 of 3 08 May 2014 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Browsing French grammars on Amazon.co.uk, I found a new TY book coming out in October 2014:
Enjoy French: Teach Yourself, by Jean-Claude Arragon is a workbook + mp3 CD for "intermediate to advanced" students. Teach Yourself are notorious for releasing previous courses in new packaging with very little change, and so I checked descriptions for previous TY and this is what I found: Teach Yourself: Improve your French (2004)
Perfect Your French (2011)
Enjoy French: Teach Yourself (2014)
Now I don't mind a book being updated and re-released; most publishers release multiple editions. But they usually state, "2nd edition", "3rd edition", etc. TY are possibly trying to fool people into buying an old book in new clothing. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell with them. TY French Conversation was re-released as two sets: "Get Talking French" and "Keep Talking French", but there was a large amount of new material added to the old. I haven't actually used Improve your French or Perfect Your French, but the reviews are good, and I have been thinking about using one of them as a follow up to Assimil (hopefully to get a fuller grasp of grammar). I might actually buy the new book when it comes out. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3769 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 2 of 3 08 May 2014 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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TY Improve your French is OK, but Palgrave Macmillan's Mastering French 2 (perhaps also doing Mastering French 1 first) is way better for your purpose. The only snag is the difficulty of obtaining the cassettes.
Mastering French 1 Mastering French 2 Edited by Hungringo on 08 May 2014 at 6:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| haziz Bilingual Triglot Newbie United States Joined 3643 days ago 28 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian)*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 3 09 May 2014 at 12:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I too found it a bit confusing when I looked at what ultimately proved to be two editions of Teach Yourself Latin
American Spanish by Juan Kattan-Ibarra, namely a second and third editions of the same book. They are poorly labelled on the Teach Yourself website and very poorly labelled on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1444192647/ref=oh_details_o 02_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Latin-American-Spanish-Audio/ dp/0071750649/ref=sr_1_16? s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399629019&sr=1-16 I ultimately purchased both; it turns out the first link is a new edition (the third) of the text. Fortunately the changes are substantial enough to make me feel not cheated. There is now a greater emphasis on fairly useful exercises and a self discovery of the language, which of course TY is now calling their "Discovery Method"; while their earlier text had large swathes of grammar explanations and cultural background in English. The new book is a little shorter but with a tighter emphasis on self discovery of the target language. I really doubt it would get me to intermediate mastery of the language however, as it claims. It is more of beginners Spanish with an emphasis on travel needs. Edited by haziz on 09 May 2014 at 12:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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