DIY foreign language aids?

[tubafatness]

Would anyone here have experience with do-it-yourself foreign language teaching aids? I'm looking at expanding my one semester of German, and it looks like I won't have any time in the near future to take the German II class offered here at UNI; with honors classes and what-not, I'll hardly have time for any extraneous classes. So, I'm looking to add on with the help of some other foreign language learning system. I've heard of things like the Rosetta Stone program and the "...for Dummies" series, but I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. Last year, I asked my German prof. what he thought of these types of tools, and he wasn't very keen on them. However, since I have no other option at this moment, I have to make do with what I can. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Aaron H.

Edit: does anyone have experience with this book? I'm tempted to buy it because of its cheap price.

http://www.amazon.com/German-Speak-Writ ... 135&sr=1-1

Further Edit: I thought I was in the Off Topic section when I posted this, so any moderators out there, feel free to move it to the correct section.

[Douglas]

Try rosetta stone. I've had friends do it with great success. Another thing I hear that works well is to do the program then go search for children's programs like Sesame Street in german.

Doug

[MileMarkerZero]

The reason Rosetta Stone works so well is that it takes visual stimuli that you immediately recognize in your native tongue and introduces another language to that stimuli. Most language courses/materials rely on auditory stimuli combined with the written word. Rosetta Stone is learning by combining visual and auditory stimuli.

As you see the picture of the horse, you hear the new language's word for horse. This is instead of reading the word horse, forming the mental image of a horse in your mind, then reading and trying to pronounce the new language's word for horse.

Make sense?

A guy that i used to work with took a job with a company in Dahrain. He was able to carry on a limited conversation in Arabic within a month of starting the Rosetta Stone materials. But it ain't cheap.

[Roger Lewis]

You might also look into BYKI (Before You Know It). It actually has a sound wave meter with the pronunciation and you can mic yourself to see if your wave pattern for the pronunciation matches the native speaker. It's got pictures and flash cards along with spoken text and it is pretty comprehensive. You download it to your computer and work from there and it's not that expensive. I just wish I had more time to spend with it. If I have free time, I'm practicing instead.

Just my $0.02.
Roger

[sloan]

Different methods produce different results - eventually you will probably want to explore several options.

Rosetta Stone is very good - if you will be sitting at a computer screen and like to point and click. I use it (not as often as I should) - and like it very much.

Pimsleur is a method that generates polarized opinions - some people like it, some hate it. It's all audio, with lessons that encourage verbal response. Good while on long walks, or anyplace you can be alone and not worried about sounding like an idiot talking to yourself in bad German. I used it on an iPod while doing rehab walking after my surgery - but haven't found the right opportunity to use it much in awhile. The Pimsleur system is reputed to be very SLOW - if you like it, you will eventually buy many, many updates...

Deutsche Welle, the German TV folk, at http://www.dw-world.de/" target="_blank" target="_blank offer language courses. I have their first course downloaded and written to about 30 CDs. I keep these in my car. This is a course intended for radio broadcast. It has a rather fanciful plot, can be listened to passively, but also has an associated workbook that is useful the first time through the course. Since it was designed for radio, the lessons are all 15 minutes long. My drive to work is 17 minutes long. Perfect! There seem to be 2 or 3 more advanced courses (one concentrating on "business German") - but I haven't found the need to download and burn the CDs for them, yet.

So...Rosetta Stone for learning at the computer, Pimsleur for active listen/response (in an environment where your babbling won't bother anyone), and Deutsche Welle for passive listening in the car (and some paper and pencil work in the workbook on the side).

If you've still got most of German I - here's a trick I've been using: sign up for a German news feed. I use tagesschau.de <newsletter@mail.tagesschau.de>. Deutsche Welle used to have a similar service, but that died a year or two ago. The idea is that you get headlines and 1 paragraph news stories - about 10 stories or so, every day. With the help of an online dictionary (I like http://dict.leo.org/" target="_blank" target="_blank), you can do a small translation every day (start with just the headlines - perhaps just the top story for the day - and work up to the whole story)

Now, if I only had the discipline to keep up with all of these...

I've tried a few other courses (the kind available in bookstores). Most are OK for what they are trying to do, but not up to the same quality as the tools listed above.