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(language)pod101? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3925 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 9 of 14 23 May 2014 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Unless I'm completely inept at navigating the site, it seems that there are only lessons for "absolute beginners" and
"advanced". The "beginner" and "intermediate" categories don't seem to exist. I'll try out the "absolute beginner" lessons for a month, but I doubt I'll be paying to renew my subscription! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4446 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 10 of 14 24 May 2014 at 12:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Their first language (the one that started it all off) was Japanese. I think that one
year of premium access cost $180 for me, although it might have been $120 (my company paid, so I never had a painful sting to help remind me :-)). The amount of material was (is) considerable: over 1000 lessons in all I think. That's a lot more material than any other course I've come across. There are plenty of beginner, lower intermediate and upper intermediate lessons plus a bunch of advanced podcasts. I've tried Pimsleur and MT, and they have their own strengths, but neither of them are anywhere near as comprehensive as JPOD101. I've heard that the Russian and Chinese and German versions are good too, although perhaps not quite as extensive as the Japanese courses. I've looked briefly at the French and Italian ones (basically to recommend or not for someone else) and while they didn't look barren, they certainly didn't seem to have that much going for them. They will spam your email address for the rest of your life, or possibly longer. Most of their spam is now caught by a filter, but I do let their "word of the day" email through. I would presume that the less popular languages have correspondingly less material. They do advertise a large number of languages, but I can't believe that it would be worth their while to produce ~1000 or even ~500 lessons for all of them ... surely they'd never see a return on their investment for many of them? 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tomohiro Octoglot Newbie Japan Joined 4124 days ago 20 posts - 41 votes Speaks: Japanese*, Korean, Galician, GermanC2, SpanishC2, Portuguese, Mandarin, English Studies: Russian, Old English, Armenian | Message 11 of 14 27 May 2014 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are some courses which are worth because they provided many materials. For
instance, Chinese 101 and German 101have been the ones I liked at most, though I really disliked others such as Japanese 101 and Portuguese 101. Generally speaking, I have seen more than 10 languages and I didn’t like most of them because they use lot of English and there were a lack of clear structure: a common complaint for these podcast services was that they were a bit ‘random’ sometimes – you have to make your own haphazard way to progress. I am not sure if they have provided better lessons after I decided to no sign up for their lessons some years ago. As for the filipinopod101, I don’t think this is the best resource for learning your target language. First, they don’t provide the beginner and intermediate categories which doesn’t make sense for me to continue with the subscription after you master the absolute beginner level. Second, there are other materials available (in English) which may provide you a solid A2 level with further grammar explanation and audio files with exercises that are obviously optional. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4790 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 12 of 14 28 May 2014 at 1:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I've tried three for the free week so far:
Frenchpod101: the advanced lessons might even be good for something but I don't need them anymore since I can easily use real material Germanpod101 and Spanishpod101: They both look good, German appears to have more content. But while they are both for big languages, they don't offer that much more compared to courses or other material online (even for free). They are one of the high quality alternatives, however. I consider Swedishpod101 because, when I am back at Swedish, I will surely suffer from lack of such material elsewhere. I think the lesser used languages are not a fault. Sure, there is less material (and the Persian and perhaps some others may be worse than the rest) but these "courses" can still be among the best available for the target language. And you have the one week trial exactly to find out whether it is worth it. News: They made an ipad app so it may be practical for offline and on the go uses. However, the spam is trully excessive. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4446 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 13 of 14 31 May 2014 at 2:25am | IP Logged | ||
I don't think of them as a podcast or as a structured course. To me they are individual lessons in MP3 format and PDF. They are split roughly by level (not always very well) and within each level they are gathered together as seasons (because, I assume, that's how they were created). I view them as a collection of grammar points and use them to supplement the other materials I have. Their greatest advantage, at least to me, is the large amount of audio. I have listened to the lessons, and at the beginner and even lower intermediate levels they do have "lots" and "quite a bit" of English. Now, however, I just listen to the pure Japanese dialogs, one after the other (sometimes on shuffle) during my commute. So I'm getting hours of exposure to Japanese every week. I have used the lessons for intensive listening (i.e. listening along with the transcript repeatedly until I think I can hear everything). I plan to use the same material for shadowing and I'm collecting the kanji-only transcripts into a document so I can print them out and use them for reading practice. There are many ways you can use this material. I've found it to be invaluable as a stepping stone towards native material (drama and books). If you're looking for something that's interesting to listen to then you probably need to look for something that's beyond the level of an intermediate learner. If, however, you are looking for a large amount of (roughly) graded material that provides an audio track and a written transcript, then there's plenty of that here (for Japanese, at least). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4446 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 14 of 14 31 May 2014 at 2:29am | IP Logged | ||
It is. It's the one thing that makes me hesitate to recommend them. There are one or two lessons that I've come across with rather too much marketing too (I expect to hear "come to our website" at the beginning or end of a lesson, but sometimes they've done more than that). They've also had one or two lessons where there was a one minute promotion of an audio book partner. That really grated too. These days I listen to the dialog tracks and those are spam free and pure target language. On my one or two runs through the Upper Intermediate material I don't recall coming across any advertising (or it was in Japanese and I didn't understand it :-)). 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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