Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6332 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish
| Message 33 of 64 19 June 2008 at 1:44am | IP Logged |
Nice review of the Buske series...
Unfortunately it seems that the Korean book mentioned is no longer available. Well, it's certainly not listed in the catalogue on the buske website...
The only Korean book listed is one that apparently assumes some knowledge of Korean already and it only has 200 plus pages. Rather a pity.
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Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6332 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish
| Message 34 of 64 25 June 2008 at 2:41am | IP Logged |
Thanks for the review of the Living Language series. I've just bought the Persian and Arabic courses and they are superb. And what value for money! I paid $300 or so for the Linguaphone Arabic course and it's so badly done that I couldn't be bothered working through the first lesson. The Living Language course seems to present Arabic in a really accessible fashion. After spending money on many books and tapes... finally something that is well written, nice transliterations and the Arabic is even in a legible typeface.
Answers in the back of each lesson too, not at the back of the book which is always inconvenient. I suppose the only downside of the thick Arabic book is that a large amount of that is devoted to regional dialects so I don't know how much vocab they actually introduce. But I suspect that after worked through this book any other Arabic grammar book would become accessible... Maybe even Linguaphone.
I managed to order the Hindi book mentioned by the Prof... out of print I think but still available second hand on Amazon... but now I'm rather excited to see that Living Language also has a Hindi course... I can't wait till that turns up.
Edited by Budz on 25 June 2008 at 2:42am
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ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7215 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes
| Message 35 of 64 03 July 2008 at 7:13pm | IP Logged |
I have made and posted a review of a series produced by Passport Books. I wish had said more clearly in the video that I believe the “Practice and Improve” levels to be particularly well-designed for getting students over the high beginner / low intermediate hump.
Also, for some reason I am unable to post responses to the queries on the Buske YouTube page. For those who asked where to find and get such courses, I recommend either going straight to the Buske site, Amazon.de, or (for those in the States) Schoenhoef’s Foreign Books.
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biki2 Diglot Groupie United States vatoweb.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6981 days ago 57 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Catalan, Arabic (Egyptian)
| Message 36 of 64 04 July 2008 at 9:46am | IP Logged |
ProfArguelles wrote:
I have made and posted a review of a series produced by Passport Books. I wish had said more clearly in the video that I believe the “Practice and Improve” levels to be particularly well-designed for getting students over the high beginner / low intermediate hump.
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One interesting feature of the Practice and Improve series not mentioned in the video is that they use the same story narrative across languages. (At least for Spanish, French and the Italian series mentioned in the video; I'm not familiar with the German series.) Of course some details are changed, but I found after using the Spanish series that the French was easier to understand because I already knew the story.
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pentatonic Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 221 posts - 245 votes
| Message 37 of 64 04 July 2008 at 1:47pm | IP Logged |
biki2 wrote:
Tne interesting feature of the Practice and Improve series not mentioned in the video is that they use the same story narrative across languages. (At least for Spanish, French and the Italian series mentioned in the video; I'm not familiar with the German series.) Of course some details are changed, but I found after using the Spanish series that the French was easier to understand because I already knew the story. |
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I have the German Practice and Improve and the Plus and they follow the same stories as those the Professor outlines in his video for the Italian versions. I agree with the professor that the Plus version is not any more difficult than the first. Actually, I agree with everything he said :) (Thanks professor Arguelles, I always enjoy watching your videos.)
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Makrasiroutioun Quadrilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Canada infowars.com Joined 6065 days ago 210 posts - 236 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Armenian*, Romanian*, Latin, German, Italian Studies: Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic (Written)
| Message 38 of 64 21 July 2008 at 12:50am | IP Logged |
I've always held the belief that exploiting the Langenscheidt collection (among a score of good German-language sources) can be a great goal of learning German in the first place. This latest video exemplifies that.
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Gilgamesh Tetraglot Senior Member England Joined 6201 days ago 452 posts - 468 votes 14 sounds Speaks: Dutch, English, German, French Studies: Polish
| Message 39 of 64 21 July 2008 at 6:33am | IP Logged |
I second that. Langenscheidt is worth learning German for.
Edited by Gilgamesh on 21 July 2008 at 6:34am
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dbstraight Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5955 days ago 30 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish
| Message 40 of 64 08 August 2008 at 2:42pm | IP Logged |
I just wanted to say that based on your recommendations (primarily the recommendation to find older language books), I've purchased several 50s-80s Spanish books from AbeBooks, and I couldn't be happier. They're so much more interesting to go through than modern phrasebook/we-don't-think-anyone-can-actually-learn-this-lan guage-meaningfully language books. Thanks for the tip.
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