The Language Most in Need of a Good Course?

[Xenops]

There was discussion about how Language Transfer, and other companies, keep focusing on making courses for popular languages (https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1975), such as French, Italian, German, Spanish (FIGS) and Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK). There are an abundance of courses for these languages.

Now, what languages, in your opinion, don't have a good course, but really should? There was some discussion that Swahili, Somali, and Bengali don't have good courses. This also might be L1 dependent: I do not know of any good courses from an English base, but perhaps for Bengali there is a good course in Hindi?

Thoughts?

Edit to add lost parenthesis.

[Ogrim]

Interesting question. One could be tempted to start discussing what makes a good course, but I'll refrain from that.

Personally I have not found a really good course in Arabic, at least not with an English base. The German Langenscheidt, which I am using, is pretty good, but it also has a few things missing for semeone who learns through self study. My old Linguaphone course in Arabic, dating from the 1970s, is also not bad, but it feels cumbersome to juggle between four different books (one with the texts, one with the transliteration and translation, one with the grammar explanations and one for exercises). I don't know of the most recent Linguaphone course for Arabic is much different. Assimil just does not seem right for language like Arabic, in the beginning it seems like you learn just one or two words per lesson, not to mention the audio which is absolutely awfully slow and unnatural.

[Axon]

I don't know what really makes a language need a course. So to answer this question you have to look at not only how many speakers of the language there are, but if they're widespread, and if they tend not to speak many other languages well.

In terms of languages with lots of speakers, Indonesian comes to mind as relatively resource-lacking for its size - but you don't find an enormous Indonesian diaspora around the world or huge numbers of Indonesian tourists visiting hotels all over the place. Even more so for Javanese. If you're not going to Indonesia, you likely won't ever need to speak Indonesian with anyone. EDIT: Although I personally haven't been to many places where Indonesians live abroad, there are far more than I originally thought. Thank you Adrianslont!

I think Somali is right up there, and also maybe Southern Min/Hokkien. I think there's one or two courses starting the learner on Hokkien from scratch, and then all the rest assume you're fluent in Mandarin already.

Tagalog and Vietnamese are fairly large minority languages in the US, though there are a few excellent Vietnamese resources out there. I've never tried to learn Tagalog but I rarely see it on lists of language courses.

[Josquin]

Irish is in dire need of a good course! The existing ones either focus on a dated grammar-translation method or they don't teach grammar at all (phrasebook style). The Living Language course doesn't even employ native speakers for its accompanying recordings.

The only acceptable course for beginners has a German base. It's called Irisch für Anfänger by Britta Schulze-Thulin. Thanks to this course, I've succeeded in teaching myself the basics of Irish. I doubt I would have managed to do so with the existing English-based courses.

[Deinonysus]

I've always wanted to learn Zulu, but none of the major programs seem to have it. No Pimsleur, no Assimil, no Duolingo. There is a Teach Yourself Complete Zulu, but judging by the Amazon reviews, the audio is awful and possibly uses a non-native speaker.

There do seem to be a lot of Zulu videos on YouTube, though.

Edit: I caved in! Working on Xhosa at the moment; it seems very mutually intelligible with Zulu from what I've seen so far.

[tarvos]

Shanghainese needs a good course. In fact, all Sinitic language that aren't Mandarin or Cantonese need a good course.

[Adrianslont]

I don't know what really makes a language need a course. In terms of languages with lots of speakers, Indonesian comes to mind as relatively resource-lacking for its size - but you don't find an enormous Indonesian diaspora around the world or huge numbers of Indonesian tourists visiting hotels all over the place. Even more so for Javanese. If you're not going to Indonesia, you likely won't ever need to speak Indonesian with anyone. So to answer this question you have to look at not only how many speakers of the language there are, but if they're widespread, and if they tend not to speak many other languages well.

I think Somali is right up there, and also maybe Southern Min/Hokkien. I think there's one or two courses starting the learner on Hokkien from scratch, and then all the rest assume you're fluent in Mandarin already.

Tagalog and Vietnamese are fairly large minority languages in the US, though there are a few excellent Vietnamese resources out there. I've never tried to learn Tagalog but I rarely see it on lists of language courses.

I think the OP (sorry for pretending to know what you meant, OP) was mainly just thinking, which languages lack a good course for anyone who wants to study them - rather than considering other factors such as diaspora or tourism or any other need. I could be wrong - doesn't really matter - it's just a fun topic for people to talk about their interests.

On the subject of Indonesian diaspora, I think you'll find it is bigger than you think. I just had a quick glance over at Wikipedia and see that it is twice the size of the Vietnamese diaspora (approx 8 million v 4 million). It's also closer in size to the Filipino diaspora (10 million) than I thought. I think your perceptions are being influenced by your US background - mine by my Australian background. Anyway, where I live in Australia Bahasa Indonesia could be used to talk to shopkeepers, restaurateurs, Uber drivers, international students, retirees etc. The only time I actually use it is the Uber context, though - maybe because you are sitting together for an extended period and would be chatting anyway. It is true of course, that I don't need to speak to any of these people in Indonesian. If you settle in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia or other middle eastern countries and employ household help, there is a very high chance that help will be Indonesian. And there is the Netherlands, of course, where people of Indonesian background are about ten percent of the population (2.3% of Netherlands population actually born in Indonesia) - making them the largest minority in the Netherlands. Again Dutch people probably don't need to learn Indonesian but there does seem to be a reasonable amount of interest in Indonesia on their part - I base that on the Dutch tour groups I have seen in Java, the non-profits I have seen in Java and Bali, my knowledge of Indonesian Studies courses in the Netherlands.

Related to your comments about Hokkien courses assuming Mandarin - I had almost the reverse situation many years ago when trying to learn Mandarin in Singapore - everyone in the class, except myself, had a background in Cantonese, Hokkien or other Chinese language. I got left behind very quickly.

Cheers.

[PeterMollenburg]

Well, I’d like to see more decent sized language courses (like Assimil with Ease courses) for smaller and regional languages such as Frisian and Luxembourgish. I do realise though, that it may not make much commercial sense in terms of how many copies they’d be likely to sell. These two languages are at least supported by government, so they’re not necessarily languages at risk and could do with some more extensive courses. Perhaps in the Netherlands there’s loads of Frisian resources from a Dutch base, and in Luxembourg, loads of Luxembourgish courses from a German base... I’d assume they’d be a few decent ones at least, but it’d be great to see something like Assimil from other language bases for these languages and others.

[Chung]

There was discussion about how Language Transfer, and other companies, keep focusing on making courses for popular languages (https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1975), such as French, Italian, German, Spanish (FIGS) and Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK). There are an abundance of courses for these languages.

Now, what languages, in your opinion, don't have a good course, but really should? There was some discussion that Swahili, Somali, and Bengali don't have good courses. This also might be L1 dependent: I do not know of any good courses from an English base, but perhaps for Bengali there is a good course in Hindi?

Thoughts?

Edit to add lost parenthesis.

I'd be interested in a good course* suitable from A1.1 to B1.1 for independent learners in the following languages.

- Afrikaans ("Teach Yourself Afrikaans" and "Colloquial Afrikaans" are typical courses of their type - a little skimpier than I'd like)
- Azeri (Öztopçu's "Elementary Azerbaijani", which I have, isn't as good as it could be since it has no answer key, not that many exercises, and only two CDs worth of audio)
- Crimean Tatar (all of the textbooks/courses that I could turn up for the Turkic Challenge use Russian, and there's no audio with any of them anyway)
- Mongolian ("Colloquial Mongolian", which I have, was tough to use, and "Sain baina uu" is very expensive whenever you can find it second-hand).
- Rusyn (there are a couple of things in Polish and Slovak to go with Magocsi's primer in English, but nothing has audio)
- Tajik (the books published by Georgetown University Press are very nice but are meant for the classroom, and so lack answer keys, and have some exercises meant to be done with a partner or two. If I'd want to take on some form of Persian, I'd go for Tajik which uses an alphabet rather than Dari and Farsi which use an abjad - no interest in an abjad at my age).
- Turkmen (the Turkmen stuff published by Dunwoody Press is very expensive whenever it turns up (a few hundred dollars for everything), and the Peace Corps' "Colloquial Turkmen" lacks audio despite being a solid textbook otherwise)

The ideal intermediary language is English, but a course issued in Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Polish or Slovak can still be useful with varying levels of effort on my part.

*by "good course", I hold Aalto's "Finnish for Foreigners" and Swan's "Beginners' Slovak" as my models (book(s) + at least 5 hours of audio in the target language (English restricted to titles of exercises and giving curt instructions/commands or subheadings. I don't want some narrator blabbing in English as he/she gives preambles of dialogues or reads aloud verbatim the summaries or explanations that I can read myself as printed in the book)

[Jaleel10]

I've always wanted to learn Zulu, but none of the major programs seem to have it. No Pimsleur, no Assimil, no Duolingo. There is a Teach Yourself Complete Zulu, but judging by the Amazon reviews, the audio is awful and possibly uses a non-native speaker.

There do seem to be a lot of Zulu videos on YouTube, though.

Completely agree. As a South African who'd love to learn Zulu you're only great option is to take classes. Which sucks because I can't afford it