Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu Jan 25, 2024 12:30 pm
I've used quite a few courses over the years and the best one I feel I ever used was Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish.
While I am a fan of the Assimil courses, generally speaking, I've never used them as prescribed and I do admit they have their limitations, but they are neat little gems packed with a lot of useable content. I've also enjoyed the Hugo In 3 Months series quite a bit early on as a beginner and certainly make use of many an audio course including the common ones Michel Thomas (great for getting one to speak, especially using a variety of verb forms) and Pimsleur (great to start with when looking to train speech/pronunciation). It's kind of unfair to compare these latter courses (as with Teach Yourself, Colloquial and other similar length courses) to a massive course like Destinos (or perhaps it's not too far behind French equivalent French in Action) both designed for a full year of university level study.
What makes Destinos and French in Action so good? Well, I do feel that FIA could lose me at times in analysis of documents at a beginner's level that requires the patience of a more advance learner as you reply to some tedious analytical questions. For this reason, I'll focus on Destinos....
What set's it apart? Well, it has everything the smaller courses have - grammar, vocabulary, drills/questions/exercises, and it also has a story, an intriguing one. And I mustn't forgot the sheer size of this course, since when describing a course that's going to be the best of the best, imo it needs to be comprehensive/big/massive even! Destinos also presents language through a great deal of video, audio, reading and writing exercises.
For me personally, focus on pronunciation is always important and of course Destinos does this. I think that pronunciation should be focused on in the beginning and extended on periodically throughout the duration of a course with finer details. Destinos does this well perhaps but with little focus at the beginning, but as it's Spanish and pronunciation is generally predictable (there are subtle complexities nonetheless) it's of no detriment to the course. There are plenty of exercises which vary in style, focus on grammar, focus on vocabulary and change enough to keep one enticed into progressing.
Another interesting thing with Destinos was the use of a 3-tier system of language in the videos. They contained easy Spanish spoken by the narrator and then there were two more 'levels' of speech in the videos with the interactions between characters in the series being spoken faster and more difficult to understand. This 'tiered-system' gives learners (or the same learner at different periods in their learning) the ability to take something from most videos depending on how accomplished they are or how much detail they want to focus on.
To provide some background, at various times and to varying degrees of duration and intensity I've studied German, Spanish, Dutch, French and Norwegian with a tiny introduction to Arabic as well. It matters as experience with various languages tends to provide feedback as you realise with each language what is important/appreciated when using various courses. Learning French taught me that I'd appreciate phonetic IPA transcription throughout a beginner's course. In the beginning for every word, later this would only be necessary for trickier words or where subtle differences in pronunciation are not clear. For Dutch and Spanish this level of phonetic transcription wouldn't be necessary for as long as for French (my opinion of course). For Norwegian, I'd really appreciate any course to be marked with the most common use (Oslo dialect) where/how one would use the two tones present for most speakers from that part of the country. This would save a learner like me hours upon hours of tedious dictionary look-ups.
So what do you need to make a great language course?
*either a decent story that keeps one interested or perhaps like Assimil, bite-sized interesting lessons that keep you wanting more (for a bigger course this could just be one component of the overall material).
*focus on pronunciation in the beginning and throughout - with phonetic transcription based on IPA and tone markings for tonal languages as per the language's complexities. One could consider some introduction to variations in pronunciation heard in other regions/countries so that the student becomes aware of some of the deviations from the standard most commonly taught versions of the language. However, this is not too important, at least not in the very early stages.
*audio (a bonus would be a portion of each lesson that's car/commute/exercise-friendly and could be used outside of the regular study for review). Another bonus would to always have transcripts to refer to in case of difficulty with aural comprehension.
*video would certainly add to the experience - transcripts and or subtitles. Actually having just read iguanamon's suggestions and having used Yabla in the past, a hover-over translation (with conjugations for verbs, phonetics and other forms such as m/f/n for adjectives, plural forms and so on) would be a great addition. For lovers of SRS, like Yabla perhaps snippets of video could be chosen and gamification and SRS abilities added like is the case with Yabla (online short video learning system for languages for anyone not in the know).
*reading - graded, increasing with difficulty as the course progresses.
*writing - also level appropriate according to where one is in the course.
*varied activities and plenty of them that take the place of FSI like drills (which will be more enticing to the learner if not dry, and simply cover all learned content). I think the sheer volume of content with Destinos helped here, whereas I have found the questions in the Assimil lessons to be insufficient - I want more questions/drills, which is in part why I needed to constantly review lessons.
*vocabulary lists (I often use these to review learned vocabulary)
*grammar explanations with exercises that follow and put into practise the newly learned concepts.
*cultural aspects/notes (including historical events, culturally important figures and the environment) always draw the learner in when they can get to know the culture(s), country/countries and peoples better. Attractive images would make for a more inviting course.
*plenty of dialogues - video, audio, written.
*like a spaced repetition-like system (but hidden in the activities, dialogues, general content), continued application of learned concepts and forms after their introduction.
*Immersion? No, I don't feel it's needed. Meaning, imo, there's no need for it to be monolingual. Certainly by the end, it would be predominantly monolingual in the textbook/workbook(s), but in the beginning most content in the book(s) would be translated, with gradually less and less of this being necessary as the learner uses more and more learned content and grasps the newer content easier without the crutch of translation being so important.
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I really do feel that almost all of the above was present with Destinos, which illustrates why I draw on my experience with the course when describing what I feel is a comprehensive language course.
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