I came across an interesting-looking site today called Linguisticator, via the Economist.
It says that it provides “an advanced online language training program designed to teach adults how to learn languages quickly and effectively. It is unique in providing a single course that can be used to learn any language on the planet. The program was designed with military and business professionals in mind, but is available to anyone serious about learning a language.”
Apparently, “With the training Linguisticator provides, it’s possible to learn languages faster and more accurately than children do, such that you can gain conversational competence in only a few weeks and fluency in a few months.”
It’s basically a video-based course that you subscribe to and watch online. It doesn’t teach a particular language, but teaches you how to learn languages systematically. You can also book individual language lessons via the website and work out a language learning plan.
There’s a free trial version that gives you a taster of the course.
Have any of you tried it?
I tried the free videos and posted my response over at HTLAL, which if you’ll forgive the repost went like this:
“I’m almost finished flying through the free test offer which allows you to watch 11 of the (my guess 70 to 100 videos) in the full version. As to the quality of the material I’ve seen, I’d say it varies from good to very good (not including the written material which I don’t have access to). His presentation in the videos is down to earth and tries to stay with the concrete even when introducing abstract linguistic ideas and terms. I would also have preferred the videos to use more illustrations and on-screen text.
Overall I think the course would have been very useful to me several years ago when I started looking a languages, language learning ideas and methods. Much of the criticism I’ve read in this thread was pretty wrong headed and misunderstood who this course is targeted at. I don’t think it’s for people who are already inclined to learn about a new subject or material through independent researches. The target grooup, I’m guessing, either don’t have the inclination, knowledge or time to do all the things a course such as this can achieve – structure the whole dizzying field of languages, methods and resources into something manageable, locate quality and understandable explanations etc. So overall I’m impressed, not fabulously so but impressed.
But then there’s the issue of the price.
If I was one of the above kind of learner who learns best with an expert guide to structure the tasks and field of language learning, then I might find the price high but well worth it, especially if it saved me months, if not years of scrambling around on my own down blind alleys. As I’m not that kind of learner and tend to learn deepest when I have to make my own sense of a field from a range of resources, I know the whole course isn’t worth the fees for me, but it wouldn’t stop me from suggesting it to others who aren’t of an auto-didact bent.”
P.S. I tried to add a link to the HTLAL thread but your spam filter seemed to have excised it.
Hmm, those are some pretty bold claims.
Pretty bold statement, I hope they live up to it
“faster and more accurately than children do”
This is one of the biggest fallacies in the language-learning business. Children, who are in their absolute prime learning phase of their life, take 6-8 years (or more) to truly master Engllish (and I assume other languages, although English speakers might be forgiven for taking a bit longer given the craziness of the language). So these systems that promise you can learn a language “quickly” using the same system that children use, a decade or more after the prime learning phase is over, are complete… balderdash, imho (to use a kind phrase).