Review of Spoken Language Series/Services
Books+cassettes, No pronunciation scores, Words, Cheap, ★★★
They offer 40 languages, recorded decades ago, so your accent may be old fashioned.
They speak each word or phrase only twice, with pauses for you to repeat. You can rewind, but this is not as easy with cassettes as with MP3, and the cassettes might break with intense use. They suggest listening to each lesson 30 times (probably wise for any program). Most languages are $90, with usually 6 cassettes; a few are up to $300 sometimes with more cassettes. Cassettes do not seem to be available from Amazon.
The books teach grammar fairly thoroughly, though not a large vocabulary. They are similar to the free FSI courses, but cover some different languages and have less drill, so you may like them more or less than FSI. (Click for Arguelles' review.)
They teach most languages in English. They teach English in 11 languages: Burmese, Chinese, Greek, Indonesian, Korean, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese.
Books+cassettes, No pronunciation scores, Words, Cheap, ★★★
They offer 40 languages, recorded decades ago, so your accent may be old fashioned.
They speak each word or phrase only twice, with pauses for you to repeat. You can rewind, but this is not as easy with cassettes as with MP3, and the cassettes might break with intense use. They suggest listening to each lesson 30 times (probably wise for any program). Most languages are $90, with usually 6 cassettes; a few are up to $300 sometimes with more cassettes. Cassettes do not seem to be available from Amazon.
The books teach grammar fairly thoroughly, though not a large vocabulary. They are similar to the free FSI courses, but cover some different languages and have less drill, so you may like them more or less than FSI. (Click for Arguelles' review.)
They teach most languages in English. They teach English in 11 languages: Burmese, Chinese, Greek, Indonesian, Korean, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese.
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