After 1,5 year of just learning vocabulary and reading and listening to Italian here on lingq, I decided I must improve the grammar. So at present I quite enjoy reading grammar explanation in the manual for Italian (It is a Czech manual, called Italian in 24 days) though I do not do grammar exercises which are included. But by reading the grammar many things start to fit together anyway.
All of them are too expensive for me! Have you ever heard of Michel Thomas Method? Is there anyone here who bought it? I want to buy a set for Spanish and Farsi maybe. Iāve been looking for a good and unexpensive offer.
Teach Yourself is just boring. Yesterday I saw a Teach Yourself book for Turkish in a bookstore. The dialogs are completely useless and so boring.
Chinese and spanish
I think that you could shadow LingQ courses. I am going to try that.
I agree. I got Pimsleur free from my local public library. If had paid full price on Amazon, I would have been angry about the quality. Pimsleur is a nice complement to LingQ for beginners.
I think Pimsleur could be improved a lot, though.
If I were to redesign the program I would:
- Cut the lessons into 10 minute units, not 30 (I suppose I could do this with Audacity, but too much trouble)
- Focus more on corpus-based, high frequency spoken vocabulary
- Less focus on traditional grammatical progression , more focus on corpus-based, high frequency spoken grammatical structures and tenses
- More focus and practice with ādifficultā but high frequency structures that are totally different from English, to compare and contrast. For example, Spanish often has an pronoun object in front of the verb. [Lo tengo] [= literally: It I have].
If you are a A1 to B2 English learner, I think there is a great monolingual video series āTop Notchā that I use as an ESL teacher. All the videos are now on youtube. I also use BBC Six Minute English and VOA Learning English.
@Sarka1 I think the way you chose to study italian is the best way to go at it.
Grammar is extremely useful and important but I find that learning grammar after getting some sort of exposure goes way faster than if I simply learn rules by heart without knowing exactly what their purpose is. Iām doing the same with Ukrainian and I find that my learning process is going better than when I started learning Russian almost 1.5 years ago.
Teach yourself is only boring if you use it in the wrong way. Focus mainly on the dialogues. Watch this video (Polyglot Master Schedule - YouTube) starting from 9:16 (9 minutes 16 seconds) in.
For Spanish, go: http://learner.org/series/destinos/index.html. I love this series.
You wont go far wrong with Assimil for Spanish. The Mandarin one is okay too.
Why not?
Because itās a good course - IMHO
Is Assimil only in French? Iām looking for the Russian one, but all the ads are in French. Iām going to guess itās a French company.
Assimil is a French publisher, but they do have books for English speakers. In your case, they publish āRussian with Easeā which you can find on Amazon.
This is my plan with Russian. Whenever I open a grammar book the gender ending rules and cases go right through my head like the wind. I kind of get the conjugations but declensions just donāt stick. Iām thinking I will stick to reading and vocabulary for the time being and the grammar will make a bit more sense after another 10,000 words or so.
Same here. I donāt understand French and canāt find the appropriate material. Is there any way to switch the language on the website?
For Spanish I used META ELE. Itās cheaper than the other ones weāve mentioned.
Itās not that pricey and all the explanations are in Spanish. Your words total is good enough that youād have no problem understand the book. If you get both āMETA ELE FINAL 1ā and āMETA ELE FINAL 2ā youāll be at B2 for under 50$ US.
I usually start with Pimsleurā¦best program ever!!! (I used it for about 10 languages)
My second favorite is Rocket Language (I used Arabic, French, German)
My third favorite is Rosetta Stone (I practically own every language)
I only ever use Assimil as an intermediate course except for Arabic (not interested in MSA)
I tried many other methods and they were ok.
Once I finish an intermediate book which really only gets you to a high A2 level, I move to native content and conversation therefore, I never tried an āadvanceā language course.
I will say that attending DLI is probably the best language course āfeel the burnā:)))))
I agree with you about MSA. Itās so hard to find material that isnāt MSA even though it is the native language of literally zero people.
Arabic is probably the most fragmented/non-united language Iāve ever seen in my life. Quite the opposite of Russian, where Russian is Russian no matter where you go.
Funny, the Canadian Assimil website does have an English version assimil.ca Although the pull down language selection menus are still in French