The new Living Language courses were on my list of ideas too
How could a publisher of awesome courses fall to this.
I guess a good candidate might be Čínština (nejen) pro samouky. Leda is a publisher of very good courses, this series of theirs usually covers the langauge from 0 to B1 or B2 in five hundred pages or so. How comes the Mandarin course is 160 pages long?
I don't need to know any Mandarin, but this looks highly untrustworthy, especially given all the usual promises made by the author.
All the courses promising great skills and having too few pages are bound to be bad. There are surprisingly many.
Panorama, a series of monolingual French courses. They were probably the first of this type to arrive to the Czech Republic, that's why they were so popular ages ago. But they have all the problems of modern classrooom aimed "communicative" courses. Chaos, chaos, chaos. Too few explanations, lists of vocab not everywhere, too few exercises, even if the teacher chose to use the exercise book too. And CDs were available just separately, priced for the teachers. A huge minus in the era before the wide spread of internet.
Studio D, a similarily wrong German course my ex boyfriend had to use for his German classes. No wonder none of his classmates could make a single sentence after two years, as the course had no explanations at all. He improved after buying a grammarbook. But he stopped learning as soon as he was allowed to. A technical highschool, logically thinking students, and their teacher chose a course based on memorisation of examples.
A professional English course for architects my former boyfriend had to use. I can't remember the name, it was not interesting. The authors obviously didn't know English that well themselves. And the tasks were really weird. "Write a letter to your friend describing this and that" and using their beginning noone younger than 150 would ever use.