Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

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frenchfish55
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Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby frenchfish55 » Wed Aug 17, 2022 10:12 am

Are there courses which just don't work and it's better to choose something else?
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Re: Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby anitarrc » Wed Aug 17, 2022 2:34 pm

don't use the Duolingo Spanish course. They added more, more and more .. but it is full of regionalisms and the English is terrible.

Example: they confuse bill or invoice with cheque.
They use
"I’ve gotten a lot of compliments"
instead of I received..

They use equally weird constructions in Spanish, not sticking to a particular region but picking things all over the place.
So, you learn some Spanish which will do for tourists but certainly not for work.

To be frank, it all depends on your personality. For me , courses centred entirely around grammar don't work. I need proper texts to learn from, not repetitive, out of context phrases. Same goes for vocabulary trainers. They seem to work for everybody but me, because everybody else doesn't get bored stiff.

For French, the Luxembourg school books from 14 years onwards seem really good. I'd have a look, bet you can get them cheap second hand. Belgian ones for Flemish kids are also much better than average, but then the source language (hardly used) is Flemish dutch

Having said all that..what do you recommend for Russian
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Re: Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby Herodotean » Wed Aug 17, 2022 10:40 pm

anitarrc wrote:don't use the Duolingo Spanish course. They added more, more and more .. but it is full of regionalisms and the English is terrible.

Example: they confuse bill or invoice with cheque.
They use
"I’ve gotten a lot of compliments"
instead of I received..


Then my (native-speaker) English is terrible, because I use "check" to mean "bill" (as in the phrase "could I have the check, please?") and "get a compliment" sounds perfectly fine to me. Or did you mean these to be examples of "regionalisms" and not of "terrible" English? Because they're perfectly fine in American English, which I suppose could make them regionalisms to some.
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Re: Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby Le Baron » Wed Aug 17, 2022 11:10 pm

Herodotean wrote:Then my (native-speaker) English is terrible, because I use "check" to mean "bill" (as in the phrase "could I have the check, please?") and "get a compliment" sounds perfectly fine to me. Or did you mean these to be examples of "regionalisms" and not of "terrible" English? Because they're perfectly fine in American English, which I suppose could make them regionalisms to some.

Of course I don't use 'check' for either a restaurant bill or a 'cheque', but I've learned to be careful and 'check' the origins of words. So many words in AE tend to be what were used in Britain in the 17th/18th centuries and survived changes they underwent in Britain. So apparently 'check' existed in England in the 18th century since the concept was something broken into a tally or counterfoil, to 'check' the validity...

It has happened many times that several words over time have morphed into French spelling; even though this word came from échec which is indeed also 'to check' among its several meanings.

I'm thinking this came to be used in the US as a word for a bill simply because it was also treated as demand for payment or an invoice (even though you do call a banknote a 'bill' and that is also a statement of money 'owed' to the bearer of the note). Personally I don't make a big deal of these differences, they're more interesting than ever irritating.

Gotten though... A bit edgy for me that one. :lol:
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Re: Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby leosmith » Fri Aug 19, 2022 4:04 am

anitarrc wrote:don't use the Duolingo Spanish course
The following post isn't opinionated at all. I freely admit to being a Duolingo hater. I believe that it not only doesn't do much, since it barely taxes your active recall, but also trains you to be a wimpy language learner, not preparing you to do any heavy lifting on your own. That being said, if you are a native English speaker and you have to use it, and many people claim they do, you should use it for FIGS. Just about anything works with them.
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Re: Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby Le Baron » Fri Aug 19, 2022 1:40 pm

leosmith wrote:
anitarrc wrote:don't use the Duolingo Spanish course
The following post isn't opinionated at all. I freely admit to being a Duolingo hater. I believe that it not only doesn't do much, since it barely taxes your active recall, but also trains you to be a wimpy language learner, not preparing you to do any heavy lifting on your own. That being said, if you are a native English speaker and you have to use it, and many people claim they do, you should use it for FIGS. Just about anything works with them.

Duolingo is problematic and has become even more so over time. It is essentially constructed by amateurs. Who would ever think of sending a letter to tell e.g. Assimil that they'd made a glaring error or lots of them? It just doesn't happen, because they employ professional linguists to create and proofread the coursebooks. Maybe they do make errors, but it's not comparable to Duolingo where users (learners) were having discussions about completely ungrammatical sentences, or rejected sentences that are perfectly grammatical. That should be enough to make anyone wary. After all if you're the learner how can you know if the things you can't judge are actually correct? You need to be able to trust the authority of the teacher.
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Re: Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby Steve » Fri Aug 19, 2022 7:04 pm

Here are some random and roughly organized thoughts.

Rosetta Stone I had access to Rosetta Stone through an employer back when it cost several hundreds of dollars. To me, it was not worth the money back then. The cost has dropped a lot since then. This was about a decade ago. I pushed through it fast. My experience might have been different if I had gone slower and if I had used the available online resources and lessons regularly.

Positive side: I found it exciting at first. I had the impression of making progress. I think the online activities and extras (not sure if they require a separate subscription today) could bring a lot more to the method, but I did not use them enough. Progress tracking dashboard was nice. For some people with no confidence in language learning and bad experiences, this could be a good first course to gain some confidence.

Negative side: I guessed wrong at some words and meanings. The vaunted voice testing (or whatever it is called) was finicky. In hindsight, chorusing/shadowing is much more effective for me than listen, pause, repeat methods. I didn't realize it at the time, but I now wonder if the edition I was using (Latin American Spanish) had speakers from different regions with different accents. Giving you four different words spoken by four different speakers on one page with different accents is far different than having two speakers with different accents having a conversation with complete sentences. They seem to recycle all the same international images for various languages instead of being regional to the language. The total corpus of material covered is rather small.

FSI I tried a couple FSI courses a long time ago, but found them too tedious for my tastes. I've not used them since. However, I have considered going back to use them as drills to improve weak points. I can see why some people swear by them and some swear at them. I think they could be very useful for some people but frustrating for others.

Commercial HS textbook I forget which publisher I looked at, but it was one of the biggies in the US used for the first couple years of Spanish courses. There was audio pushing $500 IIRC for each year's textbook and at the time my impression was it was only available to schools. I found one site that had some of the audio and listened to random parts. For the year, my guess is perhaps 20 to 30 Assimil lessons worth as I recall. The textbook was okay. Like FSI, I could see some people finding this useful and others not so much. One note is that the book was filled with huge colored pictures and cultural material that reflected curriculum requirements for what is now called something like world education. In other words, experts pick cultural material they think is important and try to package it for adolescents who probably don't want to be taking a language course. There are also many free online resources created by teachers using this curriculum.

Independent language learners with access to both the textbooks and audio could probably make use of this. However, for this price, you could get something like Assimil (and have the option to buy something different than Assimil), more useful resource books covering a range of skill levels, years worth of Netflix or other streaming services, and a number of books, graphic novels, or other things fitting your tastes. Bottom line is this is expensive and designed to be used in a regimented curriculum where passing weekly tests and quizzes is the primary goal.

I tracked the usage of this curriculum by a HS in Illinois based on their posted formal objectives written to prove to the state that they are fulfilling legal requirements. Basically, it boiled down to drill grammar and vocabulary. Student success was passing quizzes and tests. Then, they included how they added Duolingo on top of their purchased curriculum because it improved student engagement and performance.
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desafiar
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Re: Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby desafiar » Fri Aug 19, 2022 10:32 pm

Type "learn Spanish" or other FIGS language into the search box of any app store. The first half-dozen, or quite possibly many more, are those that I'd never use, nor suggest. They all appear better at entertaining and making profit, rather than helping serious learners become proficient.
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Re: Courses,methods of learning language which you don't recommend(FIGS)

Postby SpanishInput » Sat Aug 20, 2022 1:29 am

Native Spanish speaker here. I enjoy checking out different courses just to check how weird they are.

I'm swimming against the current here, but Duolingo is actually among the ones which stick to more or less common vocabulary. But I must admit it's not great and there are better ways to spend your time. As has been said, Duolingo courses are built by volunteers. But, I'm no Duolingo hater and I've actually met students who have taken good advantage of it.

Other courses give you way too much uncommon vocabulary early on. For example, I highly admire and respect Olly Richards, but his Spanish Uncovered course has many uncommon words in the first lessons, so I don't recommend it. Same goes for Easy Spanish step by step and Madrigal's magic key to Spanish. I actually had to look up some words in Madrigal because they're so uncommon. Easy Spanish step by step also contains mistakes. I checked out one of Olly Richard's "30-day mastery" books because I have Kindle Unlimited, but it had so many mistakes I just couldn't keep reading. It seems to have been down from Amazon, because if you Google it you'll be lead to an Amazon "page not found" message with a cute dog.

A couple months ago I also checked out uTalk Spanish. The "no translation, just images" exercises made things unnecessarily difficult, and the language they teach is just translations of Anglocentric sentences. I actually interviewed a representative from uTalk for my channel and asked them about these points during the interview.

I've also checked out Assimil "Spanish with ease" and was left scratching my head as to why everybody in these forums seem to have a great opinion of it. I guess there are different editions and the current one might not be the best. Each lesson seems to be just a short dialogue or a collection of random sentences with little regard for any priority in vocabulary teaching ("you have a Spanish transistor" is taught in Lesson 4. It's seriously weirder than Duolingo), and the advice on pronunciation is just plain wrong. For example, Lesson 1 says the word "buenos" has three syllables, when actually it has only two: [bwé.nos]. Lesson 2 also has a basic spelling mistake and Lesson 1 has punctuation mistakes. Yeah, it's that bad. I won't bother checking out the rest.
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