General Linguaphone Discussion

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tractor
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby tractor » Sun Dec 20, 2020 10:11 am

Lysander wrote:It is just strange and I am curious how the combination came to be, especially considering the russet and gold book is in a dust jacket that matches the other books.

I guess the previous owner had an incomplete set and bought the missing parts separately.
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blakroz
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby blakroz » Thu Apr 01, 2021 7:58 am

I have a question regarding Linguaphone German 1990 edition. I read somewhere that the audios in this edition are spoken by non-natives and is taught by someone from Canada (who is not a native German) and pronunciations and intonations have errors and it's way different from native German speakers. Is this true?
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby Faust » Sat May 08, 2021 2:27 am

blakroz wrote:I have a question regarding Linguaphone German 1990 edition. I read somewhere that the audios in this edition are spoken by non-natives and is taught by someone from Canada (who is not a native German) and pronunciations and intonations have errors and it's way different from native German speakers. Is this true?

Has anyone ever had luck contacting Linguaphone just to buy the audio of a course?

I found a 90-lesson Greek Linguaphone course on ebay for a reasonable price (just under $35 for the course and shipping.) But caveat emptor! The course came with cassette tapes and not cds.

I did contact Linguaphone to ask if they'd sell their USB drive or cds or an e-download as a standalone. But considering the fat price they charge for the full course, I doubt it.

Anyone ever have any luck using one of those cassette to mp3 recorders? It looks like they can be had for around $30 on Amazon, which will likely end up being the cheapest route....
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby David1917 » Sat May 08, 2021 4:21 am

Faust wrote:I did contact Linguaphone to ask if they'd sell their USB drive or cds or an e-download as a standalone. But considering the fat price they charge for the full course, I doubt it.

Anyone ever have any luck using one of those cassette to mp3 recorders? It looks like they can be had for around $30 on Amazon, which will likely end up being the cheapest route....


I have had Linguaphone offer to sell me CDs at 5.95 GBP/each. I've read other users saying that they have been able to get older course materials from them as well, but maybe not all of them and it's case by case.

I ended up with the Linguaphone Arabic set with cassettes off of ebay and I used the tape deck at my uni's library which was plugged into a computer with Reaper and I made audio files. Kind of a fun process to have to sit and listen to the whole course, kind of a pain. There's a chance your local library, or if anyone you know does audio engineering, has a similar apparatus.
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby AnthonyLauder » Tue May 18, 2021 5:37 pm

I have been going over some old linguaphone courses recently, and listening to the digitised recordings made from old gramaphone records. It struck me that the rewind function, to listen to a phrase several times, upon which I rely heavily, must have been extremely challenging with a gramaphone. I just can't imagine how people did it successfully. One of the most important aspects of language learning is repetition, and without a simple and accurate rewind feature, repetition must be severely hampered. I really am full of great admiration for people who used these older courses in their original form.
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby lowsocks » Thu May 20, 2021 9:13 pm

AnthonyLauder wrote:It struck me that the rewind function, to listen to a phrase several times, upon which I rely heavily, must have been extremely challenging with a gramaphone. I just can't imagine how people did it successfully.
I don't know how the average person did it either. But there were some machines specially designed to handle this problem. Here is an account by the late Ken Butler, at one time Director of the "Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies" in Tokyo (administered by Stanford University). He is describing how he first leaned Japanese, largely on his own, in 1956 at Yale:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030124165 ... cyber.html
Ken Butler wrote:I also soon found out that the institute had recorded all of the material in the 2-volume "Spoken Japanese" text on special records, and had had a local electronics manufacturer produce a special type of record player which had a foot switch connected to it which when pressed would jump the needle of the record player back one groove. This would allow the user to get a repetition of the sentence the user had just heard. In effect, the machine was designed to do what the native speaker teacher had been trained to do in the classroom in terms of the aural/oral method.

However, the machine was highly inefficient, since usually when you hit the footswitch, the needle would jump back into the middle of the previous sentence, and it required quite a bit of patience to use it. Still, my classroom instruction was not progressing the way I wanted it to, so I determined to use that machine no matter how inefficient it was
So it was possible :)

Btw, the book he used, "Spoken Japanese" (two volumes) by Bernard Bloch and Eleanor Harz Jorden (he misspelled Jorden), was republished after the war for the civilian market, by Henry Holt and Company. Later, in the 1970's, it was reprinted again by Spoken Language Services, Inc. Unfortunately, SLS closed down a few years ago (c. 2017?). You may be able to find second-hand copies, perhaps even an original army manual from the 1940's. But the audio recordings might be almost impossible to find, limiting the book's usefulness, IMO. Unless you happen to have a very patient native speaker willing to help you :)

(He says he also used the same method to study Chinese the following summer, but does not identify the book. But I think it may well have been another book in the same series, "Spoken Chinese" (two volumes), by Charles F. Hockett and Chaoying Fang.)
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bookbinder79
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby bookbinder79 » Fri Dec 17, 2021 12:41 am

Re: Sonodisc, I bought their Deutscher Kursus and Curso de Español back in the 1970s when I was at school. These came with two books and two cassettes. The covers were nice and modern-looking, but the illustrations in each lesson looked like the 1930s! I later surmised that Linguaphone was trying to target a market segment (like me) that could not afford the latest branded Linguaphone course but would be happy enough with something similar that had dated aspects such as the pictures. Given how little the actual content has evolved, it was quite a good deal.
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby ironjaw » Mon Jan 10, 2022 7:50 pm

Just received an email from linguaphone that they have their sale and some refurbished programs available. Also they offer their USB at a discount price if you have the older program. This is really something I might be considering.

Upgrade to a USB
Need to upgrade your Linguaphone CD collection or old cassettes? Why not get your Linguaphone course audio on a USB. Plug and play in any device with a USB port or download direct from the USB. Available for £29.95 per language course. E-mail us to order. sales@linguaphone.co.uk
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Oct 24, 2022 1:06 am

I just found a very incomplete Polish linguaphone set of records from the 20-30‘s. I’m assuming this is the first series. Unfortunately I only have 6 records and nothing else.
I‘ve looked around and apparently this is not really a set that’s easily available. I don’t know if I’ll find the rest of the set or the books.
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Re: General Linguaphone Discussion

Postby dlw28 » Mon Nov 28, 2022 3:58 am

David1917 wrote:
n_j_f wrote:
David1917 wrote:
Elexi wrote:Here are some answers:

I have those Danish records - they are produced by Linguaphone but they go with the old Blue/Yellow book Teach Yourself Danish course (the original grammar translation course). They have the dialogues and most of the readings read out by native speakers.

The Cantonese course is the other TY/Linguaphone collaboration - but there is a newer Linguaphone Chinese course.


I was perusing WorldCat today to see about getting one of the old hardback copies of John Mace's Teach Yourself Modern Persian course, since it is supposed to have larger script in it, and discovered that it also has a Linguaphone collaboration with tapes. I've had trouble getting Linguaphone items via Interlibrary Loan in the past, but I'll try to get one of these if only to photograph for the forum.


Just to clarify that I am reading this correctly, are you saying that audio was made for John Mace Teach Yourself Persian, or that audio by John Mace was made for a Linguaphone Persian course?

This would be excellent news either way.


It seems that audio was made for the John Mace TYS course, as in the Cantonese collaboration. I am still awaiting confirmation from the Interlibrary Loan service.


The audio and accompanying text for the John Mace TY Modern Persian course can be found on archive.org at

https://archive.org/download/50-languag ... ian-part-2
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