Reviews

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Elementary Korean Workbook: I Enjoyed What Little I Did in This

3 Korean, Books, Multimedia

In my very brief encounter with this Elementary Korean Workbook, I liked it reasonably well. It comes with a CD and is a companion to the big orange Elementary Korean textbook also reviewed in…

McGraw-Hill's Italian Vocabulary: Quirky But Entertaining

4 Italian, Books, Vocabulary

McGraw-Hill offers Practice Makes Perfect vocabulary books for multiple languages. I have found them odd in ways, with silly sentences providing awkward transitions between groups of thematically linked words. But I like them nonetheless, and I…

Berlitz Polish Pocket Dictionary, with Pencil for Scale

Polish, Books, Dictionaries

For my Polish studies, I ended up using the Oxford Essential Polish Dictionary instead of this one from Berlitz, just because that one happens to be bigger (though still small) and holds more words. The Berlitz Polish…

Spanish Grammar Drills: Lots of Good Translation Exercises

4 Spanish, Books

“If you’ve picked up this book,” writes Rogelio Alonso Vallecillos (fabulous name!) in Spanish Verb Drills, “you know that to learn a language well—to read and write and to understand others and be understood yourself—at…

Basic Korean Grammar and Workbook: Not Basic Enough

3 Korean, Books

I did not get far at all in Basic Korean: A Grammar and Workbook by Andrew Sangpil Byon. I straggled through to page 21 and stopped. A big question for me was, who exactly is the target audience? …

Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal: Good Luck NOT Finding a Dutch Word in Here

Dutch, Dictionaries, Websites

Published by the Institute for Dutch Lexicology, the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (Dictionary of the Dutch Language) is supposedly the largest dictionary in the world, many decades in the making. It covers more than 500 years’ worth of…

Live Lingua: Keeping the Free FSI Language Courses Alive

Arabic, Dutch, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Audio Lessons, Websites

These Foreign Service Institute language courses were recommended by a reader. I haven’t tried them, but the holdings are extensive and consist of older courses that are now in the public domain. They are also free, so the main…

A Mostly-Picture Book on New York's Chinatowns

3-5 Mandarin, Books

Chinatowns of New York City by Wendy Wan-Yin Tan is principally a book of photographs, and I got a lot out of it. I did, however, get a lot more out of it…

There Are 15 of These!

General, Websites, Organizations, Conferences/Lectures

As of this writing, there are 15 Language Resource Centers (LRCs) across the U.S. at various universities. The first was established by the Department of Education in 1990, according to the website for the centers, “in response to the growing national…

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