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Linguaphone Complete CD Course (Italian) Reviews

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Category: Teach Yourself Italian Guides (AKA Italian Learning Courses & Software)



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Linguaphone Complete CD Course (Italian) Review


by No1Reviews.com.

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Editor's Review:

Linguaphone, although above all an audio course, boasts a considerable amount of additional material which allows users to take their learning beyond that offered by similar products in this category. From a complete beginners level to advanced Italian, Linguaphone offers users an impressive amount of content at various levels and in differing formats making it a highly flexible language learning solution. However, users need not be daunted, most of Linguaphone's materials come with notes, transcripts, exercises, vocab lists and grammar explanations to ensure you make the most out of of the resources on offer.

Linguaphone's activities and exercises are based on a very simple teaching method; listen, understand, speak, an approach that has been used successfully for over 100 years. We found this approach simple yet effective and all of Linguaphone's educational material was professional and engaging. Call us old fashioned but we especially liked the range of text books that come with many of Linguaphone's products. These are not available with most self study Italian products and certainly not to the level that Linguaphone offer. We enjoyed being able to leaf through a real text book to find that certain grammatical rule or word that was alluding us. Complementary to the audio course, they are well illustrated and fully portable. This allows you take them with you to accompany your audio CDs or on their own for a spot of revision on the train. This aspect of Linguaphone's products set them apart from the traditional audio courses; portability is maintained while users can study vocab and grammar in more depth.

On the downside, we did feel as though the course took us through the extensive material very quickly. You are moved on to the next topic almost immediately after being introduced to the first. This left us feeling that we had only lightly covered many topics rather than learned a few well. Also, some of the listening exercises were quite unaccessible, we had to listen very hard to make out the dialog and although all transcripts are included, it is still difficult to match these up to what is actually being said. In sum, it felt as though Linguaphone's features were all present and good, but the quality didn't quite match up to that of other products in this category. Considering the relatively high price of Linguaphone products, we did expect more.

This said, if you prefer text book based learning then you will love the well illustrated, professional selection that come with all Linguaphone products. They may prove of particular benefit to advanced learners who will be able to examine the complexities of the Italian language and make great use of them as revision aids. Linguaphone's learning solutions do offer a lot of features and content. Although as a stand alone product for beginners Linguaphone may leave users feeling slightly unfulfilled, complementary to Italian lessons or other sources of learning you will not be disappointed.

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