Reviews

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iPod Nano with Pimsleur French

5 French, Audio Lessons, Multimedia

Pimsleur is my favorite self-study language-learning product to date. It offers a series of interactive audio lessons, roughly half an hour each, in which the student is cajoled, prodded, encouraged, etc., to speak a foreign language in response to brilliantly…

Perfect Your Spanish Verb Tenses

4 Spanish, Books

This book can be your companion for a review of the present tense, reflexive verbs, irregular verbs, present progressive, preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, present perfect, past perfect, imperative, subjunctive, and more. You can be a beginner and use it, but…

Italian Now! Do Not Delay!

4 Italian, Books

This book by Marcel Danesi was the most basic Italian text I used. It is a book you can truly use from a starting point of zero Italian knowledge; other beginners’ books that claim you can start from nothing often…

Korean in a Flash: This Is Cute, But Not Very Functional

2 Korean, Flashcards, Vocabulary

Korean in a Flash is a cute little flashcard kit that I purchased at a bookstore but never used back in 2010 when I was studying Korean. Now that I am writing this review three years later, I finally figured…

If Only There Were More Pimsleur Polish Lessons!

5 Polish, Audio Lessons

My only complaint about Pimsleur Polish is that there just isn’t enough of it—a mere 30 lessons’ worth. Such a shame. A Pimsleur lesson is a miracle of audio interactivity, with constant prompting that gets you speaking in your…

VocabuLearn Spanish CDs Are Now Hard to Find, But MP3s Are Not

3-5 Spanish, Audio Lessons, Vocabulary

VocabuLearn Spanish is not glamorous, but it is useful. It works like this: a voice tells you a word in English, then you come up with the equivalent in Spanish, then you are told the answer, which you have a…

Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish Grammar

3-5 Spanish, Books

Like other books in the sprawling Practice Makes Perfect series from McGraw-Hill, this one, written by Gilda Nissenberg, is packed with exercises. Some are good, but some could be better. I ended up skipping many of them. …

I Didn't Get Through 100 Words with This

2 Hindi, Books, Flashcards, Vocabulary

Your First 100 Words in Hindi (the titles in this particular language series always make me feel about five years old, which is kind of fun), I was happy to read that there are no capital letters, but…

This Advanced French Grammar Is Not Always the Easiest Book to Follow, But It Has Lots of Exercises

3-5 French, Books

This book by Véronique Mazet is full of grammar exercises, and I love grammar exercises. I also usually love grammar explanations, but Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced French Grammar wore me out. The sentences explaining grammar in this…

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