I got some CDs by Instant Immersion (a pack of 2 CDs per language). It seems okay - but it’s more learning words and phrases than the foundation behind it.
What’s the best program with which to learn a language (like, say, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Mandarin, or Persian) by grasping the foundations and structures thereof, without the need of a book, teacher, or microphone?
Thanks! Danke! Gracias! Xiexie! Shukran! Shukria! Spasibo! Evkharisto! Toda raba!
WRS - We love languages
Well, with those qualifications, the only way to really learn a language is by immersing yourself in it, i.e. moving. Seriously, spend about a year somewhere where you have no choice but to learn the language or become a hermit, and you will learn. I have a friend who became an English teacher in eastern Hungary. He moved there and found himself in the middle of a town where nobody spoke conversational English. In less than a year, he became fluent in the language (having no other foreign language experience), and now is mistaken for a native.
Add to that that Hungarian is supposedly the third-hardest language for an English speaker to learn (behind Mandarin and Arabic), and you’ll realize what an amazing accomplishment that is.
But you really have to immerse yourself where you have no choice BUT to speak the native language.
I’d recommend watching television shows or movies in those languages if possible. Something that you can watch without knowing the language, but still understand what is going on. (Dialog intensive films with little action might not be the best choice.) And finding something you enjoy watching would be best. Gradually, you’ll start picking up things. Sub-titles may help, but they may also confuse you if they’re not done well. Watching news stories in English, then watching the same stories in another language also works well.
Although I took French Immersion in school - and am now officially bilingual - my French has suffered a lot since the Quebec Nordiques hockey team ceased operations. I used to watch every game that was on television. I stopped following hockey for years after that; until Nashville got an NHL team. Now I’m starting to speak with a Tennessean accent. 
Anyhoo…
Then what good are Berlitz, Pimsleur, Linguaphone, the Teach Yourself series?
WRS
Berlitz is good, but gets expensive quickly. Primsleur and Linguaphone I have no experience with. The Teach Youself Series? If you mean the books, I think they’re pretty awful. I’ve gone through about two or three of those books (Hungarian, German, and Gaelic) and just found their structure to be ineffective for efficient learning of language. I found that too much information is thrown at you too quickly, and the progression of lessons and the concepts they build on is ill-conceived. It’s possible that other authors have done better jobs in the Teach Yourself series but I have found them absolutely frustrating. And abysmally indexed, to boot.
I much prefer the Colloquial series (Colloquial Polish, Colloquial French, etc…) for a fairly comprehensive beginner’s introduction to a language.
I own the Barron “learn German the Easy way” series and the Barron “Mastering Spanish I” series.
The German series is far, far superior to the Spanish, even if the spanish was developed for the US diplomatic corps. So much better, that after a month of cramming German I was able to travel throughout Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich, and even buy insoles of all things, but after several months of Spanish I can’t ask for a damn thing except where to exchange some cash.
Television on its own is an extremely inefficient way to learn a language, as it’s a passive medium and to really learn a language you need interaction. It’s useful as an additional method of learning, though, to a point.
I echo pulykamell’s thoughts about the Teach Yourself series. I’ve also heard that the Linguaphone programme for Irish is very poor, but I don’t know about it for any other languages. OTOH the Pimsleur Irish course is supposed to be good.
This page has links to free online courses for a variety of languages. I haven’t tried all of them and I’m sure they’re going to be very hit-and-miss, but FWIW the Serbian course I found there has been really, really good.
One other thing, pulykamell:
It depends on who you ask. I’ve also heard Finnish, Polish and Japanese cited. I think you’d be hard pressed to find any reputable linguist willing to rank languages in this way - there are too many individual differences in the learning process.
Hm. I’d heard that Pimsleur was great, but I’ve had no opportunity to check it out. (Too rich for my blood.) Right now I’m doing an odd half-ass attempt at learning Spanish. Learned some of it in school, forgot a whole lot, so I am trying to regain that and more.
I got a Barron’s book (Spanish made Easy, I think was the name) and a nice book (with Andy Warhol illustrations, no less) by Margarita Madrigal, I think. Anyway, they’re both nice books. I’ve half-assed started to go through these books, but mostly what I’m doing is reading. I have always wanted to at least read a different language (though I’d love to speak it too, naturally!). So I’m reading Harlequin Romances in Spanish. (They’re relatively cheap and in plentiful supply, and hey—if you miss a plot point here or there, who cares? It isn’t like you don’t know how it’s going to turn out.) Reading has really helped my vocabulary. I still have a lot of gaps in my understanding, but I am quite pleased with my progress, at least to a certain degree. I have come to the point where I’m capable of reading a book in a different language and it doesn’t take forever, I understand most of it, and I don’t have to constantly look words up in the dictionary! It’s really quite gratifying. The constant reading, reading, reading, really helped me improve, far sooner than I anticipated (though I still have a long way to go, naturally). So I don’t doubt that complete immersion (like living in another country) would be exceedingly effective.
I’ve also joined a few Spanish language mailing lists, which forces me to write to other people in the language. It’s all helping, but I still suck big time at the writing thing. Eh. That will come in time.
I also have some software that I’ve tried out, but haven’t gotten very far with them. I have an “Instant Immersion” set of CDs, but they don’t play very well with my Mac (even though they claim to work on Macs) and I’m too lazy to fire up the PC just for them. I also got an “intro” CD for Spanish from a highly touted series, Rosetta Stone. I’ve heard good things about them too, and I liked the little bit of the program that I tried, but the full set is too expensive for me right now. There is another program that I tried that was rather chaotic, it is made by Transparent Language. It’s okay, and I paid hardly anything for it (got all these programs for very little money), but I don’t know if I’d dedicate a lot of time to it. It doesn’t seem very effective.
One tool I found was good is “Power Japanese”.
Power Japanese was specifically intended to teach you the hiragana and katakana, and only enough more to support that. It is by no means a “full” language-learning package, but it does what it does very well. It gives you explanations, then little drills on each set of five kana. You learn a set then go on to the next, and there are challenge games where you have to spell sounds using the kana you’ve just learned.
The program was written around 1995, so it appears a little dated, and it may be out of print, but if you’re taking Japanese it’s worth searching for. I believe there was a sequel, “Kanji Moments”, as well.
For another idea to help with language learning, see my post in this thread:
take care,
hill
I’ve used the Pimsleur Japanese and I think it’s pretty good. I’ve only gone up through vol one so I’m not sure how the adanced stuff is. Plus, I do a lot of studying on my own and have taken a couple of classes so it’s not my primary source. But I think it’s good for pronunciation and speaking practice. It is very expensive. The cheapest you can find a complete set of Cd’s for is around $300. And Japanese has four sets. :eek:
The only reliable method I’ve ever found is real immersion. Go over there, if you can, and stay there as long as you can in a place as untainted by English as possible. I learned more during a four-day stay in an International Youth Hostel in Strasbourg than I did during an entire semester of High School French. I was embarassed, I was uncomfortable, I probably sounded like an idiot half the time, and got actual headaches from the mental exertion, but I engaged trampy French students with poor English skills as often as I could in conversation while there, because, unlike Paris, they’ll actually let you speak bad French there and put up with it long enough for you to learn from your mistakes. And I learned blazingly quickly compared to the times I hammered out worksheets conjugating inrregular verbs in the plus-que-parfait or whatever the hell I did during those relatively useless years.
I suppose it’s necessary to get a few basics under your belt before boldly going out into the foreign hinterlands in search of fluency. But really, once you get those basics, your marginal returns on time invested in home study or book-learned language go downhill quickly. Once you get to the level of a toddler, maybe, I think there’s no substitute for diving into the actual culture and going through the painful process of bothering whoever is nice enough to please speak with you.
I dunno, are there eco-tourist-type trips out there that one can get into, sort of exchange-for-adults kind of things? If I had the time, I’d do that in a heartbeat, and gladly pay five times what I would on tapes or classes, because the money would pay off more, say, in Corsica, than it would in Boston, MA going to the BCAE or the L’Alliance Francaise.
I agree with you, hence my hesitation and qualifying my statement by using the word “supposedly.” Finnish makes sense, as it and with Estonian are Finno-Ugric languages, just like Hungarian. They don’t share any vocabulary, but their underlying grammatical structures are very similar. I think these three languages are about the same in difficulty.
Polish (which I do speak) is difficult but it, unlike Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, is an Indo-European language, so you do get a few cognates and a more familiar grammar. Its main difficulty is pronunciation and declensions. In my opinion, the Finno-Ugric languages seem much more difficult to most English speakers than the Slavic languages.
As for Japanese, I know very little about it, but most people tell me that spoken Japanese is not that difficult. It’s the writing that’s a pain in the ass. I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never tried to learn it.
At one point I stumbled across a website offering hookups for “language exchanges” , where you help someone with English and they help you with your desired language, but I don’t have a reference for it. Immersion is definitely the best choice though, once you have some basics.
One thing about Esperanto: learning it got me over my intense fear of making mistakes in another language.
Ten years ago I went to Montréal and barely said anything for three days becayse I was so afraid of opening my mouth and making a mistake, even with something basic like asking for a tourist card at the Métro station. Now, I have a little more French… and the knowledge that the world doesn’t end if you flub the accusative case.
Precisely my experience when I tried to talk on the phone for the first time not in English. Including the headache. Was that your first time at learning to use a second language, Loopydude? I have heard that it gets easier for the next language…
Time for un retour à l’Alliance Française. Or a road trip to Montréal… 
Yup, and sadly my only real attempt. I had the serious, big-time, mega-hots for a young German woman I met while in college through family (a former exchange student who my Uncle and Aunt took under their wing and befriended). She and I kept up a correspondence and met a few times again while traveling. You can bet your sweet bottom I made some serious efforts at being an accomplished German language autodidact, but came up rather short of my intended goals. As it was her English was damn-near perfect, so really it was a futile effort. Not only that, we only made out once (and even that one time was rather tepid), after which she said she just wanted to be friends, due to the distance. I sensed I was being let down nicely. Heartbreak!
So now I’d like to learn Italian. My wife’s graduate degree is in Fine Arts/Voice, and she’s sung plenty of operas. I used to hate opera, but I’m coming around. Plus, I’ve always loved the sound of spoken Italian. If I could actually go to one of these operas and understand whatever the hell these wierdos are carrying on about on stage, that would certainly enhance my appreciation of the whole thing. The caption thing just doesn’t cut it.
Alas, even my French has been left in such a state of disuse I’m back in that state of near paralyzing fear of speaking it with real Francophones. Oh how I’d love to get away and learn again…Life’s too short.
I’ve tried two and I like them both although they take slightly different approaches.
I used Transparent Language for Polish. Transparent
I’ve just started using Rosetta Stone for Spanish. Rosetta Stone
Transparent is inexpensive - especially compared to Rosetta Stone - and if budget is a major consideration, I highly recommend it. Their web sites are very helpful,
There’s always Doperéal…
I actually did check it out - from the local library, so I didn’t have to pay for it.
I can see why some people love it, but their style of teaching and my style of learning did not mesh at all, which is not to say that it’s bad, just that it didn’t work for me.
Another question - those of you who found foreign language mailing lists, where/how did you find them?
Finding mailing lists and other resources…
I found Esperanto-language resources such as mailing lists primarily by getting plugged into the Esperanto-speaking community, and secondarily by searching the net.
There are some major central resource pages for the language, that try to link to everything they can. Esperanto-speakers are so thin on the ground in North America that the net is playing a major role in keeping us together. I spend a lot of time on the instant-message network, both for practice and to keep in touch.
French is a different affair. Since I live in Canada and Toronto, it is easy to find French media: there are two French radio stations here, for example, and one French TV station, and a dozen cable channels. And we get the newspapers from Montréal. However, actual French speakers in Toronto are easily outnumbered by speakers of a dozen other languages.
Again, I decided to see what resources I could find through the school where I was taking lessons, the Alliance Française.
My French teacher did not know of online resources such as mailing lists. The AF does, however, have social events and get-togethers. I’m still in the basic learning stage, though, and I’m not very conversational yet, so I haven’t yet plugged into the French-learning social network. When I get to that point, I hope to find more online connections.