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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4506 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 17 of 24 11 April 2015 at 3:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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I, unlike Serpent, am extremely visual. I do everything by written word, looking at my
surroundings and so on. I don't do much auditive learning at all and I tend to find purely auditive resources really boring. Which is why I place a LOT of emphasis on pronunciation and Skype calls (sometimes with video off), because this is the area at which I suck the most. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6396 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 18 of 24 11 April 2015 at 4:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sure, I meant these kinds of listening too, not necessarily audio courses or radio or whatever. And I think you do listen to music?
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4506 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 19 of 24 11 April 2015 at 5:02am | IP Logged | |||||
I do listen to music but insofar as this constitutes a part of my active language learning... no, the majority of it is in English. I generally listen to music to further my music skills, not my linguistic ones. That's more oriented on me learning how to play the guitar. I've decoded a few song lyrics, but this is in all honesty a very minor part, and it may help a bit with motivation but it certainly has never substantially improved my level, with the singular exception of Rammstein as a teenager when learning German. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3317 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish | Message 20 of 24 11 April 2015 at 5:14am | IP Logged | |||||
Well structured, grammar based, with a good number of exercises. Feels like a light-weight version of FSI. Easy to complete - start from the beginning, and do all the exercises. Can't get much easier than that. By 'decent results', I mean that my French improved, and I was satisfied that the value I got from the course was worth the time spent. No problem with timeframe, finished both courses in around a month each. Edited by rtickner on 11 April 2015 at 5:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5275 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 21 of 24 20 April 2015 at 3:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi,
I've used Teach Yourself, Hugo ... in 3 Months, Advanced Hugo, Tell Me More, FSI, Assimil, FIA, Destinos, Fluenz, Colloquial, Destinos, Routledge Intensive..., Rosetta Stone, Paul Noble, Michel Thomas, Pimsleur, Rocket languages, and others. You can only learn so many words/grammar a day. I agree with Iguanamon- the course doesnt matter so much what matters is that you apply yourself consistently to learning. The difference between most courses in terms of vocab and grammar acquisition/learning is not likely to be substantially different as you will move faster if the material is easier and you will slow down if overhwhelmed- so it's best that the material is appropriate to your level/pace and what you choose probably matters little. However in my experience I dont like Tell Me More much (altho I haven't progressed that far in it) and Rosetta Stone is garbage. The former seems cumbersome to operate the latter akin to a very one-dimensional sales gimmick, which brings me to my next point.... ... I like to use multiple courses (multi-track approach) to reinforce grammar/vocab and to provide variation in the methodology and overcome monotony. One could conclude that doing a course that is multi-track within itself would be best. FIA (French in Action) and Destinos seem best at this. Plenty of audio, plenty of grammar, plenty of exercises, a TV 'show' to follow along with, plenty of reading (some of it authentic reading materials), plenty of writing. However for some people that can be overwhelming (these courses in their enitrety are huge). Assimil is great with it's bite-sized lessons- a real sense of progress occurs. FSI is great for drills. And just for the record Fluenz is a pretty decent computer based program while Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, Rocket, and Paul Noble are all decent enough to get some good listening/repeat practice while commuting. PM 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7004 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 22 of 24 20 April 2015 at 10:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Professor Arguelles site has a lot of video reviews of
language learning courses. I also found FSI Programmatic and Basic Spanish to be very good. Edited by luke on 20 April 2015 at 10:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 23 of 24 20 April 2015 at 11:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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As FSI has been mentioned several times, here is a website with several dozen public domain FSI courses. If you want to download several, use a torrent to spare the site's bandwidth.
As others here have said, the 'best' course varies by learner. A course that's great for your first romance language will be slow, belaboured, and tedious for your fifth one, because you'll already know so much of what it's teaching and verbosely explaining. To a lesser extent, this applies to any course you take for your fifth language vs your second one, even if they're unrelated. And any course that you won't use much (because it's boring, too hard, too easy, has far too many or far too few drills for your preferences for that language at that point in your learning, because you dislike the content or examples or structure or how the pages feel....) is useless, no matter how much value anyone else gets from it. This isn't subjective fluff; polyglots who speak ten or more languages rather competently vary drastically in their language learning material preferences, and even on factors like whether to acquire all the major skills (pronunciation, reading, writing, listening, speaking) at once. A lot depends on your goals, as well. "German for reading" is useful for anglophones looking to read German quickly; it won't help you much if you want a solid beginner command of touristy phrases instead, or a lot of active verbal grammar drills. Similar comments apply to the "Madrigal's magic key" books, Lingua Latina, etc. It looks like you're looking for programmatic drill courses, but is that really what you want for, say, Latin? That said, given your stated preferences, I'll guess that you'd probably like latinum. You haven't said enough about your goals, background, or preferences for me to know if you'd like Destinos or French in Action. For any given language, it's useful to have more than one source of materials too - as you mentioned, pronunciation is important, and no publisher seems to cover it well for a wide range of language. Edited by Volte on 20 April 2015 at 11:35am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4808 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 24 of 24 21 April 2015 at 2:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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The subjectivity and questions like "what do you mean by "works"", that is no post
modernism or being snobs, that is just a way to find out more about your needs. Every learner is different and what works for you depends on lots of things, such as your language and educational background, your tastes, your goals and timeframe for completing them, amount of free time you can invest in learning and so on. There is no single scale from RS to FSI (even though quite everyone agrees RS is overpriced crap). It simply doesn't exist and the reason is not that most people around here just "feel like learning" instead of learning. Without such information about you and your needs, I can only recommend you to read the forum a bit, use the search function and get to logs of successful learners of the languages you are interested in. The forum is full of things that work for a part of htlalers. Even some of those image filled courses (at least the better examples of those) can work for someone supplementing them with other things who gets to the end. THere is a growing list on our wikia that could as well give you some kind of initial crossroads so that you know what to look for and ask about in particular ;-) short lists of what has worked for me so far: French: some of the image heavy courses (alter ego is good, most are crap), grammaire and vocabulaire series by cle, lots of native material ranging from easy things like asterix to novels and tvseries, an old course using the classical grammar translation method based in my native language Spanish:a classical TY-like course, grammar books (such as gramatica de uso del espanol), a classroom meant course Fiesta (not the image heavy one, a more reasonable Czech based one), again lots of native resources German: Themen Aktuell (a classrooom aimed course), Assimil, FSI, Klipp und Klar (a grammar), stuff on the Deutsche Welle website for learners The list will be different for each learner even though with some common points among many. However, I still recommend you to read through the forum a bit because 1.you won't probably suspect us anymore of being stupid roseta stone lovers who can't even know whether we are learning or not :-D 2.you will find lots of answers 3.you will find more straight to the point questions to ask in order to get the best answers. And I'd like to join those asking whether you need such a list for your own use or a different purpose. If you are choosing what to learn from such a huge list, it might be a bit too early to ask for resources for every language on the list, choose a few you are likely to start. If you are looking for a huge list for your own language learning themed website or blog (which is an option that came to my mind immediately when learning your original post), you might as well not ask people to do vast majority of the work for you. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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