CompImp wrote:I sampled the first two lessons of French because i thought this would be a good course the way people are expressing their enthusiasm about it.
I must say, i think the content is absolutely dreadful.
-Might be wrong but the guy sounds like he's not a native speaker. 1 non-native + 1 learner = useless.
-Are we learning French or English ? Up to now i can't tell, because it says French but i mostly hear English.
-Getting a learner with zero experience of the language to try to speak is also utterly pointless.
-The dialogues are boring and contrived.
-The whole thing feels and sounds very amateur.
All in all i would, based on two lessons, call this course less than worthless. It's so boring i would have to be paid to sit through the whole thing. I wanted to turn it off less than 2 minutes into 'lesson' 1.
Is there something i'm missing ? I've heard raves about this all over the internet and yet it seems like a bad mock up of some of the worst available 1-1 'teaching' the internet has to offer.
This is such a staggeringly unfair review that I initially answered quite childishly. Having deleted my first message and to answer your points in turn:
1) Indeed he's not a native speaker of French (or any languages except English and Cypriot Greek). He has native-speaking volunteers check his work.
2) You're learning French, but the first few tracks he is explaining how the whole thing works, so it's mostly English. Afterwards the course is a mixture of English and French. This family of methods would be even better if a way could be found to eliminate the need for English prompts; but no one has found a way yet. As is, many of us feel the pros of the method more than make up for that limitation at the absolute beginner stage.
3) The method overlaps with that of Michel Thomas and one thing they share is that the non-native learner is a feature not a bug. Far from being pointless, it's actually essential for the method to work.
4) There are no dialogues. What on earth are you talking about?
5) Well, apart from the Swahili course, which was paid for, it is amateur in the literal sense; however the teaching quality is far better than many professional courses.