Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

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Cainntear
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby Cainntear » Thu Apr 13, 2017 12:03 pm

Montmorency wrote:As far as I know it doesn't actually exist, but if there were a course (or series of courses) with titles like:

"I can make you speak [insert language(s) of choice" by Paul McKenna,

...I think those would be candidates.

Horrible thought: perhaps they really do exist...

I don't think our non-UK-based colleagues here have any notion of the true horror of that thought.
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby Elexi » Thu Apr 13, 2017 1:05 pm

I second Speakeasy on Fokus Deutsch - I too bought the whole thing at great expense during a brief moment of wealth - it looked good until I watch the videos are realised that the story line went from the tristfully dull to something approaching the psychadelic without the fun.

But I keep thinking that something could be made of the vast audio resources this course contains - maybe by mapping it onto another course like the Living Language Ultimate German - but that would take more energy than I have left in this life... :cry:
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu Apr 13, 2017 1:45 pm

Living Language French Platinum Edition
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Language-French-Platinum-Tutoring/dp/B019NRDVSI

The pace of progress through this collection of 3 courses is like that of a snail climbing an incredibly steep ascent on a polished sheet of glass coated in water repellant. Ironically, it's also as dry as cardboard in a city of cardboard, where all the food is cardboard- and this is coming from someone who enjoys FSI!

Although not a course, NTC's Compact Dutch an English Dictionary was absolutely annoying and pathetic, so much so I threw it in the bin
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0844201014/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492088048&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=ntc+dutch+dictionary&dpPl=1&dpID=518R74yXbTL&ref=plSrch
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby Cavesa » Thu Apr 13, 2017 5:46 pm

The new Living Language courses were on my list of ideas too :-D 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? :-D 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.
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby PfifltriggPi » Thu Apr 13, 2017 8:46 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:Although not a course, NTC's Compact Dutch an English Dictionary was absolutely annoying and pathetic, so much so I threw it in the bin
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0844201014/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492088048&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=ntc+dutch+dictionary&dpPl=1&dpID=518R74yXbTL&ref=plSrch


Quietly cries at the thought of anyone throwing away a dictionary. :(
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PeterMollenburg
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby PeterMollenburg » Fri Apr 14, 2017 1:36 am

PfifltriggPi wrote:
PeterMollenburg wrote:Although not a course, NTC's Compact Dutch an English Dictionary was absolutely annoying and pathetic, so much so I threw it in the bin
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0844201014/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492088048&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=ntc+dutch+dictionary&dpPl=1&dpID=518R74yXbTL&ref=plSrch


Quietly cries at the thought of anyone throwing away a dictionary. :(


In short: crapest dictionary in history!

5 reviews on amazon and an average of one star (out of five)- i wouldn't put it past having been thrown in the bin by a few others too. Absolute garbage. I would get angry at the book trying to use it. I really hoard language learning materials, and it was a relief to throw this one out.
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby Teango » Fri Apr 14, 2017 3:00 am

Cainntear wrote:
Montmorency wrote:As far as I know it doesn't actually exist, but if there were a course (or series of courses) with titles like:

"I can make you speak [insert language(s) of choice" by Paul McKenna,

...I think those would be candidates.

Horrible thought: perhaps they really do exist...

I don't think our non-UK-based colleagues here have any notion of the true horror of that thought.

I recall seeing some Paul McKenna courses in German in the self-help section of a Thalia bookstore in Darmstadt several years back. I think they promised the usual assurances (e.g., riches, confidence, weight loss), but the mere thought of Herr McKenna making me speak any language does send a shudder up my spine. Und.....schlaf! *schnipp*
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cathrynm
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby cathrynm » Fri Apr 14, 2017 5:46 am

Maybe Learn Japanese in your Car?

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBHrEqZTL1k[/youtube]
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Suzie
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby Suzie » Fri Apr 14, 2017 7:24 am

Adding Sprachenlernen24 to the list. This German publisher sells "courses" that are not much more than basic SRS vocabulary training, and not really cheap.

I had tried those out four years ago (for French), and quickly found numerous mistakes (typos, grammatical errors etc.). Bad thing was - even if you knew the error, it wasn't that easy to solve that (well, I remember the programming code could be accessed to some extend and would have allowed edits...but my IT skills aren't really....well, I don't have anything that could be called "IT skills"). And the software wouldn't allow you to ignore that card - in order to get rid of it, you would have to type the error again and again, until it was considered "learned" :roll:

In addition, the software had multiple bugs, which from time to time wouldn't allow you to use the course at all. Customer support was basically non-existing (I believe they added my account to a block list after a while anyway ;) )

While emk's English as She is Spoke is clearly the winner of this contest ;) , I still wanted to mention this course as a general warning to any German-speaking language learner who considers buying this.

This makes me realize how much I love Anki....
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Re: Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

Postby luke » Sat Apr 15, 2017 1:06 am

Atinkoriko wrote:Reviving this thread just for the sheer hilarity of 'English as she is Spoke'


And its prequel, "'English as she was Spake'. :lol:
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