Living Language "Generations"

[n_j_f]

Hi all

I have read many posts on this forum and HTLAL about the various 'generations' of the Living Language series, especially the excellent Ultimate series from the 1990s onwards. One series, however, that seems to have been overlooked is the Spoken World series which appear to be contemporary with both the Ultimate series up until the introduction of the Complete series. The only course of the Spoken World series that I have had a look at was Spoken World Farsi. My impression is that the Spoken World series are based on the methodology of the Ultimate series with dialogues and vocabulary lists but with less material. The smaller amount of material doesn't seem indicative of a 'dumbing down', more like an introduction to various languages that were not part of Ultimate series.

I would be interested in hearing opinions of this series as I'm interested in purchasing the Hindi and Irish courses. The only course of the Complete series that I own is Complete Russian. There is a note in the coursebook that the course has been adapted from Russian, The Basics. I'm assuming, however, that the Basics series is completely different to the Spoken World series and therefore Spoken World Irish and Spoken World Hindi would be different courses entirely from the Complete counterparts.

Since changing my email address, I have not been able to register with the HTLAL forum, so apologies if this has been covered previously. Would it be accurate to group the various Living Language courses in 'Generations' like the Assimil courses?

1st Generation (40s? to early-90s)
Living . . ., later Conversational . . .
French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew for English Speakers, as well as English for speakers of other languages.
Later Portuguese and Japanese, as well as an Advanced Conversation Manual for French, German, Italian and Spanish that covers verb usage.
Living . . . and Conversational . . . reviewed by Prof. Arguelles in his Foreign Language Learning Series as two separate series, but from I can determine they are two names for the same course.

2nd Generation (90s to early 2000s)
Ultimate Beginner and Ultimate Advanced
French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, English (presumably for Spanish speakers), Mandarin, Japanese

3rd Generation (mid-200s), arguably part of the 2nd Generation
Spoken World
Dutch, Thai, Farsi, Swahili, Irish, Polish, Korean, Tagalog, Croatian,

4th Generation (2010 onwards)
Complete . . .
French, German, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, English/ESL, Korean, Greek, Russian, Irish, Hindi, Arabic
Earlier editions of some of these languages were titled Complete . . . the Basics

[tangleweeds]

I like the Spoken World Irish course a lot for grammatical explanations, but the main male voice on the audio does not sound like a native speaker to me, or the people I asked on the Irish Language Forum.

[Speakeasy]

Hello n_f_j,

Living Language Series
I think that you have captured the essential Living Language series. The only additions that come to mind would be that Random House also published some elementary materials, phrases books, and the like, not worthy of note, and that they launched an online course that does not seem to have been very successful.

Living Language Spoken World
I have the Ultimate courses for German, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese as well as the Spoken World courses for Dutch and Polish. The ‘Spoken World’ courses used exactly the same approach as the ‘Ultimate’ courses, which, in passing, was originally published as ‘All The Way’. The only significant difference between the two series was that the Spoken World series was somewhat more concise than the Ultimate series, it was accompanied by 6 CDs as opposed to the 8 CDs, a second volume containing more advanced materials was not published and, whereas the Ultimate Series covered a few of the “more commonly studied” languages, the Spoken World series covered a few of the “less frequently studied” ones. I greatly appreciated all of the courses that I used and, in general, both series have been well-received in the Amazon Customer Reviews and on the HTLAL.

HTLAL Search
I conducted a G-search of the HTLAL using the criteria “spoken world”, “spoken world Hindi”, and “spoken world Irish”. With a view to locating discussion threads that mention the ‘Spoken World” series, I placed the search criteria in quotation marks. To do otherwise seems to yield results where “spoken” and “world” appear, which is not very useful. Generally speaking, the “Spoken World” series has been well-received by the HTLAL Forum Members. A nice feature of these discussion threads is that some members comment on alternative materials for studying either Hindi or Irish.

[n_j_f]

I like the Spoken World Irish course a lot for grammatical explanations, but the main male voice on the audio does not sound like a native speaker to me, or the people I asked on the Irish Language Forum.

Thanks for the link. I will keep the comments in mind if I purchase the Spoken World Irish for my library and I've bookmarked the Irish forum for later.

[n_j_f]

Hello n_f_j,

Living Language Series
I think that you have captured the essential Living Language series. The only additions that come to mind would be that Random House also published some elementary materials, phrases books, and the like, not worthy of note, and that they launched an online course that does not seem to have been very successful.

Living Language Spoken World
I have the Ultimate courses for German, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese as well as the Spoken World courses for Dutch and Polish. The ‘Spoken World’ courses used exactly the same approach as the ‘Ultimate’ courses, which, in passing, was originally published as ‘All The Way’. The only significant difference between the two series was that the Spoken World series was somewhat more concise than the Ultimate series, it was accompanied by 6 CDs as opposed to the 8 CDs, a second volume containing more advanced materials was not published and, whereas the Ultimate Series covered a few of the “more commonly studied” languages, the Spoken World series covered a few of the “less frequently studied” ones. I greatly appreciated all of the courses that I used and, in general, both series have been well-received in the Amazon Customer Reviews and on the HTLAL.

HTLAL Search
I conducted a G-search of the HTLAL using the criteria “spoken world”, “spoken world Hindi”, and “spoken world Irish”. With a view to locating discussion threads that mention the ‘Spoken World” series, I placed the search criteria in quotation marks. To do otherwise seems to yield results where “spoken” and “world” appear, which is not very useful. Generally speaking, the “Spoken World” series has been well-received by the HTLAL Forum Members. A nice feature of these discussion threads is that some members comment on alternative materials for studying either Hindi or Irish.

I remember you mentioning the All The Way series as being more or less the same as the Ultimate series.

Maybe somewhere on this forum we can have articles on different courses and their respective 'generations' with comments, additions and corrections. It could be useful to avoid duplicating purchases due to different names for the same product. I would be happy to submit one for Living Language.

[Gala]

The 1st generation Living (insert language) and Conversational (language) are practically identical to the 2nd generation Complete (...) and Complete (...) the Basics courses (these coexisted w/ Ultimate,) and the Advanced Conversational Manuals that existed for certain languages then became Beyond the Basics (...). They may claim that the current Complete courses are updatings of the Complete.... Basics series, but they are well below the level of those (most especially for those languages that had a Beyond the Basics course.)

The Ultimate series is of course the best, but all of the previous generation LL courses are better than the current. I own Spoken World Croatian, and while I haven't yet used it, it does (as you say) appear to be a somewhat condensed version of the Ultimate (beginner-intermediate) courses. I don't think it constitutes a generation in itself, but rather is devoted to less-studied languages for which an Ultimate course did not exist.

[James29]

Beyond the Basics _____ is a good "intermediate" course. It is less dense than the Ultimate Advanced series and the conversations are a tad bit shorter and a tad bit easier.

[Speakeasy]

Living Language All-Audio Series
A couple of weeks ago, I came across an offer on EBay for a low-priced copy of the "Living Language All-Audio German " course. I checked the Product Description and Customer Reviews on Amazon and, despite a number of negative comments that had been filed under every language-variant of this series, I took the plunge. I received delivery of my cherished legacy language course earlier today, converted the 6 CDs to MP3 format, and started playing with my new toy...

Random House published the Living Language “All-Audio” series beginning in 1997 and ceased production a few years later. The course materials included 6 audio CDs and a rather small Listener’s Guide. Upon playing the audio recordings, I immediately recognized these materials as being a “partial extract” from the "Living Language 'Ultimate' Course (Basic-Intermediate)" which I had studied some years ago and which I still have in my collection. My overall impression is that, despite the high quality of the “Ultimate” courses from which these materials were drawn, this “All-Audio” variant was a very poor adaption of the former. In my view, Amazon Customer complaints that the “All-Audio” materials were strung together in a haphazard manner and that they meant for students already having a knowledge of the target language were unfounded. The (somewhat abbreviated) audio recordings of the “All-Audio” course follow the same sequence and general presentation of the “Ultimate” course, which is widely recognized as having set a high standard for self-study language courses. The real problem with the “All-Audio” course is that the editors “rushed to market” a poorly-conceived partial extract of a good programme, without providing adequate audio support necessary to replacing the course book that accompanied the "Ultimate" series. I can well understand why this product met its demise!

[Elexi]

Speakeasy - I think the 'All-Audio' courses you mentioned were re-released as the 'Drive Time' courses - perhaps with a bit extra? I have the German version but it is essentially parts of the Ultimate Beginner-Intermediate course chopped up with vocabulary and audio exercises added in.

I have used the Spoken World Dutch course and have the Greek one. As said they are slightly slimmer versions of the Ultimate Beginner-Intermediate courses. I would rate the Dutch one very highly, I think it is probably the best beginner course for Dutch there is in terms of the balance between not too frightening (as Colloquial is) and not too basic.

[James29]

A year or so ago when I was considering French I checked the "All Audio" course out of the library and was not at all impressed. I could not recommend it to anyone with other superior all audio courses like Pimsleur and Paul Noble (even though those are not perfect).