Just some thoughts on learning a foreign language through another learned language.
If English is your L1, many people only attempt to learn another language through English. And that’s fair enough, but it might not be the most practical if you have other tools at your disposal. Professor Arguelles strongly suggests people that dream of being a polyglot learn French and German. With English, French and German at your disposal there is a wealth of material available for the language learner. The same could also be true for Japanese and Chinese, and to a lesser extent, Korean. Click here to read more.. »
In the first Self-Study Materials overview we covered the big names of Assimil, Linguaphone, FSI, etc. This time we’ll go over a few of the other big names; the big names that many of our readers will be more familiar with – Teach Yourself, Colloquial, Hugo and Living Language. Click here to read more.. »
There are about as many language learning products as there are icecream flavours. And just like icecream, some are delicious and some should just be avoided like the sweet perfume of durian. To make life a little less roulette-like, I’ll give you a list of some of the products I have personally used with some of their key features.
Assimil: A dialogue-based course from France. Everything is contained in one sleek book; target language on the left, translation on the right. It’s light on grammar and that’s how I like it. The audio is of a high quality, although a little slow and as a result needs some editing. The dialogues themselves are light-hearted and often a little humourous, which makes studying even less of a chore. The downside to Assimil? Not a wide collection of languages unless you have reading knowledge of French, Spanish or German. I usually buy several books at a time direct from Assimil to save on shipping costs and I’ve had them sent to both Australia and Korea with no problems. Click here to read more.. »
