Musings, resources and links on learning, pursuing and loving languages.
I'm a bit over-zealous at times, but this is a list of many of the languages I would like to know. They are loosely grouped by language family. My preferences for which order to learn them in change from month to month.
I really like Assimil. These are some the best valued, least painful, least time consuming ways to develop familiarity with a language. You develop an ear for it, and you avoid being bogged down in generative rules and tables of conjugations and inflections. Some people don't like them; they're probably not for everyone, but if you're comfortable with not understanding every nuance of everything that you're encountering, then you should give them a try.
Assimil courses are available for many languages. A large number of them are only available in a source language of French. Thus, if you find that you like Assimil, and aspire to learn many languages, it's probably worth the effort to buckle down and learn enough French to be able to use them. The three most important languages for a ployglot to learn, with regards to the availability of language learning resources, are English, French and German.
Also good, if your into drills, are the Foreign Service Institute language programs. Beware of poor typesetting, poor quality audio, lack of variation in voice actors, etc. Also, these courses are generally designed for use in a class-room with a native speaker as an instructor, so sometimes they are not as explanatory or fleshed out as necessary to use for self-instruction.
Many of the courses are mostly based on re-writing and repition drills. The drill methodology isn't perfect, but it's relatively safe to say that no other courses give you as much oppurtunity to form innate, generative reflexes when attempting to learn a new language. They also have some pretty awesome introductory phonology courses that can be a major help to a beginner for improving their pronunciation.
Many FSI courses are available for download from fsi-language-courses.net.
Pimsleur courses are very expensive and do not introduce a substantial portion of the language to the learner. However, they are very good for:
These courses varry widely in quality, and you should check things like Amazon.com reviews before commiting to a purchase. I mention them here, however, because they are generally:
Arabic is very hard to find good self-study resources for. I have not studied Arabic very seriously yet, but some thoughts are as follows.
Bengali seems ridiculously hard to find good resources for, given the number of native speakers in the world and its rich literary history.
There are many good resources available to an English speaker for learning French. The real question is, which are the best.
French in Action is a great course for self instruction. It consists of 52 lessons; each lesson has a 30-minute video component, and then audio recordings that are used in conjunction with a workbook to plumb the depths of what was introduced in the video. The audio and workbook component are absolutely vital to the self-learner.
The FSI French Basic Course is quite comprehensive, and is available in its entirity on fsi-language-courses.net. It consists of 24 units, each with between two and a half and six hours of audio. There are over 3 days of audio in total. It is one of the better FSI language courses available.
In my opinion, the course should be preceded by the FSI Introduction to French Phonology course, which is also available on fsi-language-courses.net. That course consists of ten lessons, about an hour of audio each, where obersvations of vowel and consonant pronunciation, as well as orthography, are presented to the student. It is very beneficial to go through this and thus to have a reasonable understanding of French pronunciation before starting with the Basic Course. The Basic Course starts with the recordings at full native speed and makes no attempt to introduce the sounds of the language to the student systematically.
If you decide to use the FSI courses from the internet, you will get the books in PDF form. Sometimes these books are also available for purchase elsewhere on the internet. For example, the book for the FSI French Phonology course is avilable on amazon. It is very nice to have these books in a paper copy, so that you not as tethered to the computer when you are studying. I would not pay more than $25 for these books if they are available in PDF form somewhere on the Internet. You can have the PDFs printed by self-publishing sites on the Internet and the books mailed to you. I did this with the 500+ page second volume of the FSI Basic French Course, and it cost me less than $21 bucks. The book arrived looking great and well bound. Some reputable self-publishing sites on the Internet include lulu.com and createspace.com. I used lulu.com for the French course and it was great.
The Assimil course New French with Ease is probably the the best Assimil courses available in English. It is the only Assimil course which was not translated into English from a French course, and so the progression of introduced grammatical concepts is sometimes more natural to an English speaker than in other Assimil courses. It is available for a good price on amazon.
My page on Latin has my methodologies and recommended resources in regards to learning that language. Assimil also makes a course for it, but the course is only available in source languages that I'm not yet proficient in (i.e. French).
For Spanish, platiquemos is a remastered, retypeset version of the FSI Spanish Basic course. It is supposedly excellant for self instruction.
The Assimil Spanish with Ease course is quite good and not too expensive. Being European, it presents the Castellano pronunciation, instead of that of Mexico or South America.