Rare Language Courses

[Ug_Caveman]

I remember when I joined the forum a few years ago that there was a thread where people posted photos of their language learning material collections.

Since that time I've tried to hunt down several courses/books to add to my collection, and after much effort I have manage to find several very rare (or at least that's how it seems to me) courses on physical media:

Assimil Zweeds Zonder Moeite and Reading Dutch: 15 Short Stories:
As Assimil do not (yet) offer an English-based Swedish course, I went for the next best thing (from my perspective anyway), a Dutch-based course. While I'm obviously not yet competent enough to use it as a primary learning material, it's much easier for my to decipher meaning from the Dutch text as opposed to the French- or German-based courses. Trying to hunt a copy of this book down genuinely made me wonder if it was ever actually released, as copies were virtually non-existent until I found a second-hand bookseller in Europe who had one. The Dutch reader was a book I'd been hunting for some time, and was lucky to finally catch one for sale after several years.

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Assimil Using Spanish and Assimil Business French:
I'm somewhat surprised Assimil haven't released modern versions of either of these courses for English speaking audiences given the popularity of the languages studied, but nonetheless... After quite some effort I managed to track down copies of both courses in very good condition (both with cassette audio too! Just need to get myself a cassette player now...)

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Are there are rare courses you've managed to track down which your proud to see as part of your collection?

NB: To anyone involved in photography and image editing, I can only apologise for the state of my own photographic skills

[Tutescrew]

Well, I am not sure how rare it is, but I have a "Third Generation" Linguaphone Course for Polish, with cassettes. The only issue is that the actual course book in L1 was missing when I purchased it, but by some miracle I found an edition that was published a few years earlier. Now, will I ever use it? THAT is a good question.

Tutescrew

[jmar257]

I have a bunch of Assimil courses I've bought the past few years, I'm not sure which are rare but I know some probably are. About a year and a half ago I was in a situation where I was making extra money and had low living expenses so I'd occasionally check AbeBooks or Amazon and if they had an Assimil book I didn't have that was priced reasonably I'd go ahead and buy it despite not having plans to use it any time soon. I'll get a picture sometime this afternoon and throw it into this post of my little collection. I have at least one very old one, I believe it's a 50's German Without Toil.

Edit: Here they are. Forgot I had an old course for Italian as well.

[Le Baron]

I have this old Langenscheidt Italian course from Dutch. From 1958. It's four vinyl discs with books, or booklets rather, the same size as a 45 single format and the records slip into the back of them. I've never been through it. I found this in the street left out for the bin man! The records don't have a scratch on them.

[Ug_Caveman]

Question for anyone who's used it - is the audio from Using Spanish the same as the audio for Perfectionnement Espagnol? Or are these separate courses?

[AroAro]

I am happy to have Assimil Serbo-croate Sans Peine from 1972. The course seems to be comprehensive and I also have mp3 files with recordings. I would like to buy Armenien Sans Peine as well but it looks it's not available anywhere - there is one copy somewhere on ebay for 300 USD but I'm not going to buy it for that much.

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And I am proud to have the course books by a local Polish publisher "Wiedza Powszechna". They are on the market since 1952 and they published courses for major Western languages as well as for the languages of other communist countries. So I have here Romanian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czech, Serbo-croatian and 4 different books for Russian. Most of them were printed only once or twice (even during communist times, people preferred to learn Western languages if any) and never redesigned nor reprinted after 1989 but their quality is really good, the grammar is very well explained and they contain multiple exercises (including translations).

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[dgc1970]

I am happy to have Assimil Serbo-croate Sans Peine from 1972. The course seems to be comprehensive and I also have mp3 files with recordings. I would like to buy Armenien Sans Peine as well but it looks it's not available anywhere - there is one copy somewhere on ebay for 300 USD but I'm not going to buy it for that much.

Make them an offer for $20. You would be surprised what ebay sellers will accept.

[David1917]

I am happy to have Assimil Serbo-croate Sans Peine from 1972. The course seems to be comprehensive and I also have mp3 files with recordings. I would like to buy Armenien Sans Peine as well but it looks it's not available anywhere - there is one copy somewhere on ebay for 300 USD but I'm not going to buy it for that much.

Serbo-croate3.PNG

I found this on ebay recently too. Some genius had a copy for something like $900. I asked him if it was a typo, and he reprimanded me because the book is so rare. Like yeah, it's rare, but you're insane if you think you're getting that amount of money for an extremely niche item. Another one popped up for around $30 so I snagged it.

[Chung]

I remember when I joined the forum a few years ago that there was a thread where people posted photos of their language learning material collections.

You might actually be referring to this old thread although a lot of the photos of our bookshelves there are now broken links.

As for rarer courses chez moi, I do have the following:



Sova, Miloš A Practical Czech Course for English-Speaking Students. SPN: Prague, 1962
Lehtinen, Meri Basic Course in Finnish. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1963

I used that communist-era book for Czech to get a better grounding in grammar after having finished Naughton's Colloquial Czech and taught myself a fair bit of Slovak. Unfortunately all that I could find was the textbook (I didn't realize that there was a second volume with the answer key) so needed a Czech language partner to correct my answers to the book's many exercises.

I picked up that big ol' Finnish book via ebay for the reasonable price of roughly $50 rather than the extortionate one on Amazon for Routledge's reprint. Sometimes the original edition does turn up for a similarly reasonable price as I paid, like at the moment of typing this sentence. I haven't got around to using it but whenever I resume Finnish, it'll be waiting for me as source of extra drills (thanks also to CELTIE at Indiana University for the audio files!).



Tserenchunt, Legden & Sharon Luethy Сайн байна уу? Mongolian Language Textbook One. T & U Printing: Ulaanbaatar, 2000
Çankaya, Birsen et al. Turkish Self-Study Course. Fono Yayınları: Istanbul, 2012

I stumbled on the Mongolian book as a semi-impulse purchase on Amazon at a reasonable price (I paid about $40 for my used copy many years ago) with an eye to restarting Mongolian someday. Maybe. I luckily managed to get hold of the audio files from the old CELTIE site at Indiana University not long after having received the book. Unfortunately I've never been able to find the remaining two volumes of the course through Bookfinder.

I got wind of the Turkish kit through a forum recommendation and shelled out a little more than $100 to get it from Amazon. I worked through the first volume and the first few lessons of the second volume before putting the course aside when stopping my Turkish studies. It's a little like an old-fashioned FSI basic course by emphasizing learning by repeating the recorded sentences on cue and doing simple drills. Unfortunately, a lot of the audio is devoted to someone reading vocabulary lists and sentences of every chapter. As far as I remember none of the exercises were recorded and are meant to be done in writing as there's an answer key at the end of each chapter.

[AroAro]

I am happy to have Assimil Serbo-croate Sans Peine from 1972. The course seems to be comprehensive and I also have mp3 files with recordings. I would like to buy Armenien Sans Peine as well but it looks it's not available anywhere - there is one copy somewhere on ebay for 300 USD but I'm not going to buy it for that much.

Serbo-croate3.PNG

I found this on ebay recently too. Some genius had a copy for something like $900. I asked him if it was a typo, and he reprimanded me because the book is so rare. Like yeah, it's rare, but you're insane if you think you're getting that amount of money for an extremely niche item. Another one popped up for around $30 so I snagged it.

I paid 28 EUR for Serbo-croate, I think it was a reasonable price and it was within the limits I set to myself when it comes to buying old course books on ebay/amazon.

I've just checked on ebay and Armenien Sans Peine costs now 1295 USD So they really believe someone is going to pay that much in the end. Fortunately I have an (illicit) pdf copy with recordings so I'm not that desperate to buy it.