Reply to: Business speak...

[NetwkSupport]

Learning a language takes years. It is not like learning some technical stuff for your job. There is no way that you can learn to any reasonable standard without being there for a number of years and taking many lessons. As for learning mandarin, it's virtually impossible unless you grew up with the language.

BS. Japanese is just as hard and i know someone who has learnt it to a good conversational level after just a few years.

[Turion]

Learning a language takes years. It is not like learning some technical stuff for your job. There is no way that you can learn to any reasonable standard without being there for a number of years and taking many lessons. As for learning mandarin, it's virtually impossible unless you grew up with the language.

[Lockhouse]

Always wondered about the Michel Thomas courses. I dismissed it as hype but maybe I'm wrong. Is it completely or mostly audio based? I'm looking for a course I can do whilst driving mainly.

They're good for tourist level (French) but I reached a plateau quite quickly. I didn't try the vocabulary builder though. I want to retire to France but my language isn't going to improve until as others have suggested I a) learn all the irregular verbs and tenses and b) go and live there.

They are tapes (or MP3s) btw.

[NetwkSupport]

completely audio based but the do do a book too if you want.

[lightng]

Always wondered about the Michel Thomas courses. I dismissed it as hype but maybe I'm wrong. Is it completely or mostly audio based? I'm looking for a course I can do whilst driving mainly.

[BrianSnail]

blimey, my 2000th non-LR post.

[Platypus]

The Rosetta Stone stuff looks very good but very expensive.

Anyone tried these?

[ookook]

I've never been very impressed by the tapes - I listened to a few once and they seemed a bit "emperors new clothes" he gets you saying longish sentences but theres no grammar rules taught.. Its all very well being able to say "Theres a frog in my bidet" or whatever, but you need to be able to construct the sentence to be " theres is/was/will be/might be a frog in my/your/his/hers/your plural/ours/their bidet" and you cant do that without knowing how to construct all the verb forms and the irregulars which you need to memorise..

[Platypus]

Im going to learn using audio from http://www.michelthomas.co.uk/

Highly recommended

Look an amazon - can get the same for much less money

In fact half price
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Michel-Thoma...8996739&sr=1-1

[NetwkSupport]

Was interested in it when at school. Got a "Teach Yourself Book". Later my parents bought me a Linguaphone course for Xmas. Later did a course in it at college with a native speaker as tutor.

Purple Dalek - can you speak mandarin then? how well if so?

[NetwkSupport]

Those tapes are pretty pointless, I learnt Spanish from working in Spain for a few years, my brother was learning from these tapes and they are useless, unless you sit down and study the grammar properly you'll have no chance.

The only thing is to go and live there, or you'll never pick up the slang, the nuances of the accents and the voice tones and you'll never get used to listening to 8 spanish people shouting away at the same time, all talking over each other

I imagine Mandarin is an absolute nightmare since it's tonal based.

good point would need to live over there but for the basics mikkel thomas is very good, quite ground breaking in his approach in terms of audio learning.

[voodooflux]

Im going to learn using audio from http://www.michelthomas.co.uk/

Highly recommended

Cheers - I'll check those out.

EDIT - blimey, my 2000th non-LR post.

[ookook]

Those tapes are pretty pointless, I learnt Spanish from working in Spain for a few years, my brother was learning from these tapes and they are useless, unless you sit down and study the grammar properly you'll have no chance.

The only thing is to go and live there, or you'll never pick up the slang, the nuances of the accents and the voice tones and you'll never get used to listening to 8 spanish people shouting away at the same time, all talking over each other

I imagine Mandarin is an absolute nightmare since it's tonal based.

[Purple Dalek]

I've been mulling over learning Mandarin for a while. How do you plan to go about it - audio course, college, etc?

Was interested in it when at school. Got a "Teach Yourself Book". Later my parents bought me a Linguaphone course for Xmas. Later did a course in it at college with a native speaker as tutor.

[NetwkSupport]

I've been mulling over learning Mandarin for a while. How do you plan to go about it - audio course, college, etc?

Im going to learn using audio from http://www.michelthomas.co.uk/

Highly recommended