Contest: The Worst Language Programmes Ever

[Skynet]

MICHEL THOMAS TOTAL FRENCH

1. I understand that the vast majority of language courses exaggerate their CEFR, but "The classic Michel Thomas Method course, perfected over 25 years. Go from total beginner to speaking confidently in a matter of hours." is nothing short of a snake oil salesman's pitch.
2. Who wants to learn a foreign language from someone who sounds like they have a slight (but noticeable) speech impediment and a heavy non-native accent?
3. Who wants to have their attention strained by a bumbling student who asks the most vacuous questions? I do not believe that it is possible for any human being to be that slow!


OXFORD TAKE OFF IN FRENCH

This language learning series has seriously put Oxford's name into disrepute! This is a glorified phrase book with an astonishingly high amount of English. It is the only course book that I have ever been unable to finish. DREADFUL!

[Querneus]

Raymond Dawson's A New Introduction to Classical Chinese (1968) uses 20 passages of real-world Classical Chinese, diving into native material from lesson 1 (which is standard procedure in Classical Chinese textbooks. I know of only one, literally one, Classical Chinese course that doesn't use real texts from lesson 1, and it's out of print! I'm not sure why almost all Classical Chinese textbooks dive into native material from the beginning, instead of teaching the language more gradually and systematically...), and no vocabulary notes are provided for any of the lessons. Rather, the student is supposed to look up every single word in the glossary at the back, which has characters arranged by radical and stroke number, like real Chinese dictionaries. Dawson's justification is that the student should get used to looking up characters in dictionaries by radical and stroke number, but in my opinion, to force a beginner student to do so is just perverse.

Amazingly, the thing is still in print.

(Other Classical Chinese textbooks do provide vocabulary notes for each lesson.)

[lavengro]

MICHEL THOMAS TOTAL FRENCH

1. I understand that the vast majority of language courses exaggerate their CEFR, but "The classic Michel Thomas Method course, perfected over 25 years. Go from total beginner to speaking confidently in a matter of hours." is nothing short of a snake oil salesman's pitch.
2. Who wants to learn a foreign language from someone who sounds like they have a slight (but noticeable) speech impediment and a heavy non-native accent?
3. Who wants to have their attention strained by a bumbling student who asks the most vacuous questions? I do not believe that it is possible for any human being to be that slow!

I suppose à chacun son goût but for me, the Michel Thomas Foundation course was a very helpful component of a learning approach to French, Spanish, German and more recently Italian.

[Axon]

There's a whole lot of nonsense in the English as a Second Language market.

The very first student I taught was a cook at a Mexican restaurant. I was doing my TESL program at my university at the time and had to log a certain number of one-to-one English lessons. The restaurant was right next to my apartment and the guy even said he had his own textbook that he was learning from - though he said all this in Spanish.

Turned out the book he used was a real gem created by people who clearly had no idea how anybody spoke English in real life. It was printed on pulp stock and even the sentences without errors made little sense. I remember that the first lesson began with "I must do my duty. Have you done your duty?" and included common everyday vocabulary like "fountain pen."

[PeterMollenburg]

Fokus Deutsch by McGraw-Hill
Riding on the popularity of their classroom-dedicated French in Action and Destinos Spanish programmes, McGraw-Hill sought to repeat their success with a German course which they published as Fokus Deutsch. Having used and been impressed by their French and Spanish courses, I purchased, at great expense, the entire package of teacher and student manuals, including all of the audio and video recordings. While I admit that the basic elements of the language are presented and while the video portion was particularly challenging, although sometimes confusing, I found the printed materials and even the audio recordings to be extremely poorly organised. Quite seriously, I have never, in my entire life, come across supposed “instructional materials” that require such massive jumping around amongst the various course components within a particular lesson unit. It was the distracting and frustrating disorganised nature of the materials that lead me to put the entire, expensive, package in the recycling bin. Had I been taking classes with these materials, I would have withdrawn early on and would have requested a refund.

Hmmmm. I had heard this course didn’t live up to FIA nor Destinos’ lofty levels in the upper echelons of comprehensive language courses (which are also enjoyable). Coming from you, Speakeasy, this doesn’t bode too well for my complete collection of Fokus Deutsch (video dowmloaded, the rest bought new), should I ever one day make it to German through the collections of other course materials in various other languages I had purchased over a rainy decade or so of language learning procrastination. The recyle bin over this way has something to look forward to, by the sound of it.

I bought the Platinum version of Living Language French Complete. Despised it! It gets good reviews, but I really did not like it, too slow moving, like teaching a baby.

Edit:
I can almost rival you, though, Speakeasy. Although not a course, once upon a time I threw NTC’s Compact Dutch Dictionary straight in the bin (recycling it seemed just plain wrong) in absolute disgust. The claim on the book’s cover: The most practical and convenient Dutch and English dictionary. What a joke! I could never make any f***** sense of the thing. Absolute opposite of those claims. And I’m not alone, 4 ratings on Amazon, average score: one (out of five). i.e. all reviewers equally as disgusted and pissed off at the book as myself!

Another edit:
I already said the above just over a year ago!! No wonder it’s taken me so long to learn French!

Living Language French Platinum Edition
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Language-French-Platinum-Tutoring/dp/B019NRDVSI

The pace of progress through this collection of 3 courses is like that of a snail climbing an incredibly steep ascent on a polished sheet of glass coated in water repellant. Ironically, it's also as dry as cardboard in a city of cardboard, where all the food is cardboard- and this is coming from someone who enjoys FSI!

Although not a course, NTC's Compact Dutch an English Dictionary was absolutely annoying and pathetic, so much so I threw it in the bin
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0844201014/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492088048&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=ntc+dutch+dictionary&dpPl=1&dpID=518R74yXbTL&ref=plSrch

[PeterMollenburg]

MICHEL THOMAS TOTAL FRENCH

1. I understand that the vast majority of language courses exaggerate their CEFR, but "The classic Michel Thomas Method course, perfected over 25 years. Go from total beginner to speaking confidently in a matter of hours." is nothing short of a snake oil salesman's pitch.
2. Who wants to learn a foreign language from someone who sounds like they have a slight (but noticeable) speech impediment and a heavy non-native accent?
3. Who wants to have their attention strained by a bumbling student who asks the most vacuous questions? I do not believe that it is possible for any human being to be that slow!

I suppose à chacun son goût but for me, the Michel Thomas Foundation course was a very helpful component of a learning approach to French, Spanish, German and more recently Italian.

Agreed (in that it was useful for me too). Sorry Skynet I feel that the claim by MT in nbr 1 of your points is actually valid. It really gave my spoken language a boost at the time and helped activate using various tenses on the fly. Mind you, I could be an exception or just odd (see my forgetfulness above. Actually I somewhat remembered that post but couldn’t remember where I’d posted it). Sure I’d done some other courses, but I think the claims by MT as somewhat valid.

Non native accent is annoying, as are fumbling, slow students can be also, agreed.

[DaraghM]

I'm going to bounce this thread with a few resources I've found pretty bad.

Colloquial Latvian - Christopher Moseley

The original course had non-native speakers on the dialogues, with some of the worst native speaker voice artists I've ever heard. The grammar explanations were awful, and I vaguely remember the author apologising for the course, as Latvian wasn't even his speciality.

One to One Dictionary Series

I've never purchased one, but I have flicked through them. They're available for a large number of languages, but I think they're produced by Google Translate or something similar. They have the strangest selection of words I've seen in a dictionary. They'll feature a word like forenoon but not forage, forensic, etc.

[tomgosse]

I'd like to add my two favourite worst language programs.

Rosetta Stone

Other members have already commented on Rosetta Stone's faults. I would add the course leads you to choose the right answers even if you don't understand the grammar. This gives you a false sense of progress. I found that I was learning to manipulate the program and not learning French.

Adult Ed course in French

I took an adult ed course at a famous university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The instructor spent most of his time rolling his eyes, and complaining about our bad pronunciation. I wondered why he expected something else when this was a beginners course.

The text book was written by the head of the French department, it was very expensive, and it was mandatory to purchase it. The book had a lot of white space, and was printed in a large font to make it seem that there was more information in it than it really had.

The audio tapes that went with the course were terrible. The volume was too low, the speaker spoke in a monotone, and there was a lot of bleed through on the tapes.

With both of these courses I went a couple of months and could not ask, « Bonjour ! Comment ça va ? » I learned more French from a little Berlitz phrase book. They left a sour taste in my mouth.

Finally I found a great French teacher at the Marlborough Public Library and when she left I've continued with self-study.

[Lianne]

French classes in Canadian English public schools.

Seriously I started somewhere in elementary school, definitely by grade 3 but maybe earlier, and kept going until grade 8. I reached adulthood as basically a false beginner. I could count to 100, conjugate être and avoir in the present indicative, exchange the very basic pleasantries, and name some things like animals, colours, school supplies, etc. I feel like 6 years of French class in school should at least get you to A1.

[Jean-Luc]

I tried twice Rosetta Stone in order to check if I could have missed something... Arabic or Chinese types of languages were the worst!