Anyone tried Udemy Courses?

[Elexi]

I am going through Anne Le Grand's French subjunctive course on Udemy and it is a nicely done course in the style of her YouTube videos but including quizzes, sentences and dialogues. So far its been worth the £10 I paid in their summer sale.

Anyone have any other Udemy recommendations? Some look decidedly dodgy, while others look quite interesting.

[Jaleel10]

Anyone have any other Udemy recommendations? Some look decidedly dodgy, while others look quite interesting.

Hi, Elexi

Not for the languages that I see in your profile but I have tried a few for Spanish. The best one is Spanish 1-4: Beginner, Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced. Everything else pales in comparison. More than 100 hours of content and for such a low price is nothing to be scoffed at. It's more of a classroom style course and not a 'get-speaking-fast' type one so it might not appeal to the average person. Nonetheless, it's a great companion for a student studying on his own especially at the A levels.

Two other great ones for Spanish are Intensive Spanish Listening and The Path to Fluency.

Other than that, I have not fallen into the wanderlust that is common in this forum I have got a few other courses for: drawing, and some for Greek, Egyptian, East Asian and Norse mythology (bit of a nerd). Can't really complain though do I agree that some do look and are* dodgy so you'll just have to go by the course ratings, lesson plan, comments and the sample videos. I think they offer a refund as well if you're not satisfied. A lot of times they run ridiculous sales too so you'll often courses heavily discounted.

* "learn 2000 Spanish words in less than 30 minutes" Ugh, yes, I know, I know. I've heard it a thousand times. Yay for cognates.

[willcouchman]

Hi,

long-time lurker and first time poster! (I used to post on the old HTLAL forum).

Just had to chip in here - I'm learning Korean and have found Udemy a GOLD-MINE.

Daniel Lin's Core Korean courses (1-4) are what I wish I had found months ago - they are dozens of hours of (sort of) audio-lingual style Korean drills, from basic up to intermediate. I'm only early into Course 2, and going back and re-drilling Course 1.

It's kind of like an updated FSI Korean into modern language, but - the only downside - just listening and repeating and not creating your own sentences like FSi did.

It does do a similar thing of getting the language in somewhat automatically, though rather than just going through the course to absorb it, I'm taking a Timothy Moser 'Accelerated Spanish'-style approach and converting the whole course into my own memory palace 'world' with mnemonics to memorise all the grammatical structures and words. It's been essential for me, and I'm actually thinking of getting it all written down properly with illustrations to put up on a blog or something.

The first course deliberately teaches very few words (like maybe 50? not sure) but drills every conceivable permutation of them. Course two already is stretching my poor brain! Korean is a hard language, but Course 1 is the first resource I would have started with had I known, to build a firm base. I explained it to someone recently, that if I can't instantly and unthinkingly translate "I was going to go there" and "I should be able to do it" and "I need to get used to it", and dozens or hundreds of similar variants, there's no point moving on. So I'm going back to Course 1 slowly.

Sorry I got a bit sidetracked, but I do think that Udemy has some seriously impressive courses on there. I've skimmed through courses 2,3 and 4 and don't plan on using anything else for now they are so comprehensive and practical.

All the best!

[dampingwire]

I've used the Udemy Japanese N2 and N1 courses. Both of them are (IMHO) quite good.

When I first looked at the N2 course the price was about £10 (iirc), as a special down from the "normal" £100 or so. I hesitated for a day and when I looked next it was ~£20. It jumped up again the following day. I tried a new browser and the price was back to £10. So watch out for their dynamic pricing!

[garyb]

Udemy seem to go for the Sports Direct style model where there's always some kind of sale on and nobody ever pays the much higher "normal" price. Most courses seem to vary between £10 and £20 depending on which particular sale is on at the moment. If what you want is at the higher end of that range and you're in no rush, you can probably just wait a few days to save a little. Their strategy is to make you think there's a limited time left and rush into buying.

I'm following a few music courses on it and I'm finding them great. Feels like the best of both worlds: the practicality and wealth of knowledge of YouTube etc. combined with the structure and progression of conventional courses. There's no shortage of good info online for free, but I'm happy to pay a small price to get it in a sensible format that gives me a place to start and a logical order to follow. I've never tried their language offerings though.

I have tried to find courses in other languages on subjects that interest me (again music, mostly), but since it's an English-centric site, both the quality and quantity of English offerings are far higher. I'd love to kill two birds with one stone and work through these music courses in a target language, but it's too much of a compromise on quality of instruction.