Lidl selling languages

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rdearman
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Lidl selling languages

Postby rdearman » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:49 am

I was in Lidl yesterday and saw a bunch of language courses on sale. It was interesting because they looked like a pretty good introduction course and they were only £4.99 each. I seriously considered picking up Spanish and German, but I don't need those kind of distractions.

https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/intens ... dl-1237295

It does show that there are a lot of people who are interested in learning a language, since these get snapped up quickly, but perhaps people in the UK aren't all xenophobic, but rather put off by the high cost of entry into language learning, plus they don't really know how to go about it. I wonder how many of them will carry on learning after they complete the CD? Or even if they know where to go?
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Re: Lidl selling languages

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Jan 15, 2018 12:05 pm

I wish we still had Lidl in Norway. They probably started a few years too early.
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Re: Lidl selling languages

Postby DaveBee » Mon Jan 15, 2018 12:22 pm

rdearman wrote: but rather put off by the high cost of entry into language learning, plus they don't really know how to go about it. I wonder how many of them will carry on learning after they complete the CD? Or even if they know where to go?
Also there's not usually any real need for it. If we travel abroad on holiday, you can get by with english. Most employment is concentrated in the domestic economy, and import-export can function again with english. Probably not the case with dutch.
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Re: Lidl selling languages

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jan 15, 2018 1:59 pm

The Lidl course aren't really "a thing" -- my mum has the French and German courses and they're basically completely different. The covers are the same and they've both got 4 CDs of audio, but the formatting and the content have few similarities.

Actually, looking more closely, they're slightly more similar than I thought: neither of them have much practice at all.

Basically, you've got a few dialogues, very sudden explanations of grammar, a lot of "listen and repeat" and some very weak exercises. The exercises in the German are very much drill type (give the correct article for the noun; substitution drills of the form "that was a beautiful book"->"that was a beautiful house" etc). The French seems to have mixed in a few of the more lightweight and insubstantial types (e.g. anagrams) of even less value than the drills.

Now I know some people like drills, but at the end of the day, even if you do, you'll recognise that they aren't much good if you do one on the day you are introduced to the grammatical feature and never again -- drills are about repeated practice, after all.

Anyway, as I said, it's not a series -- they've just bought up a couple of older courses and rebranded them (the books even have different imprint names inside, although they both appear to be owned by the same publishing house). Hell, the French coursebook kept referring you to "the cassettes" (the German one thankfully is slightly more recent and gives CD numbers and track numbers throughout).

I imagine there's £5 worth of material in there if you want it, but they don't look like anything I'd use personally....
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Re: Lidl selling languages

Postby Cavesa » Mon Jan 15, 2018 2:28 pm

Many people buy things they don't necessarily need, just because they are cheap at the given moment. I don't think most buyers will get far in their course.

I definitely wouldn't attribute the low foreign language skills of the UK population to xenophobia, I think those are two separate issues, one of which I don't want to talk about here. When it comes to languages, most simply can see no real need to learn a language. And certainly, you can hardly blame xenophobia, as the courses are teaching German, French, and Spanish.

The entry costs are not that high these days. One of the good aspects of Duolingo has been making the entry costs zero. You pay as soon as you want to learn more, as soon as you are sure you want to learn the language. And when you do, you are not going for a cheap Lidl course (which must logically be cheap for a reason).

If Encyclopedia Britannica was on sale at Lidl for 10 pounds, everyone would buy it too. How many would actually open it more than once?
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Re: Lidl selling languages

Postby Elexi » Wed Jan 17, 2018 9:49 am

There was a discussion of these courses here - In my view, when compared to similar style products on the market such as Collins or Berlitz courses, they are good value and cover the same ground:

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =19&t=6093
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Re: Lidl selling languages

Postby aokoye » Wed Jan 17, 2018 6:13 pm

rdearman wrote:It does show that there are a lot of people who are interested in learning a language, since these get snapped up quickly, but perhaps people in the UK aren't all xenophobic, but rather put off by the high cost of entry into language learning, plus they don't really know how to go about it. I wonder how many of them will carry on learning after they complete the CD? Or even if they know where to go?

Well that escalated into political and/or ideological themes quickly.

And yes I'm assuming you typed that in jest, but really given some of the threads of the past seven days...
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