Best foreign language study book

While I haven't used them, I have heard that the courses available from the Government Printing Office (GPO) are good. At least they should be cheap. I have heard that these are the same courses they use to train foreign service officers.
 
I've learned French and Italian, and I must have tried half the books and CD sets available on the market.

I agree with the others who found Rosetta Stone overrated. While it's a great way to learn basic vocabulary, there's no grammar instruction and you don't learn anything about the structure of the language.

If you're looking for a refresher in German I would recommend the Pimsleur CDs. Somebody says (in english) "I walked to the store today", there's a pause, and then they'll repeat the phrase in German. They work their way up from basic sentences to more complicated ones, and slowly add new words. There are 30 half hour lessons per CD set. I think this would be a good way to remember the stuff you've forgotten.

If you want to learn Spanish from scratch then I would recommend one book that covers grammar, one book that covers verb conjugation (with lots of exercises), and the Pimsleur (or any similar) audio series for practice.

Another good learning tool is flash cards. I've bought a couple sets of flash cards from http://www.flashcardco.com/ that were great in helping me build a solid base vocabulary.

I think most of it comes down to how you learn, and what you're looking for out of the language. I'm analytical and don't mind learning things by rote, so of my recommendations are based on what worked for me.

Anyways, all that said, no book or CD set can give you "real conversation" practice that's essential to learning a language. I spent only 4 months in Italy, and my Italian improved more than it did during the previous 8 months of fairly intense studying. I'm sure you're busy, but if you could manage to meet a Spanish speaking person once a week for lunch to chat in Spanish I think it would be more valuable than any learning material you could buy.

Good luck!
 
I've been learning french for the past 5 weeks using the course from Assimil called New French With ease.

It's basically a book with conversations in French and the translated conversations in english, then it has notes at the bottom explaining some of the grammer points. The conversations start out simple obviously and progress. If you buy the multimedia back you get 4 CDs in addition to the book which has actors reading out the French part of the book which is vital in my opinion because french pronunciation is tricky.

I've tried a few different courses in the past and I'm really happy with this one, I feel like I make progress during the day and I understand the grammatical rules in addition to assimilating the language. I'm interested if anybody else has an opinion of them.

In addition maybe you should check out the wikibooks language courses for free over the internet. The french one is pretty good, not so sure about the spanish.
 
Quote from Mamet:

I've learned French and Italian, and I must have tried half the books and CD sets available on the market.

I agree with the others who found Rosetta Stone overrated. While it's a great way to learn basic vocabulary, there's no grammar instruction and you don't learn anything about the structure of the language.

If you're looking for a refresher in German I would recommend the Pimsleur CDs. Somebody says (in english) "I walked to the store today", there's a pause, and then they'll repeat the phrase in German. They work their way up from basic sentences to more complicated ones, and slowly add new words. There are 30 half hour lessons per CD set. I think this would be a good way to remember the stuff you've forgotten.

If you want to learn Spanish from scratch then I would recommend one book that covers grammar, one book that covers verb conjugation (with lots of exercises), and the Pimsleur (or any similar) audio series for practice.

Another good learning tool is flash cards. I've bought a couple sets of flash cards from http://www.flashcardco.com/ that were great in helping me build a solid base vocabulary.

I think most of it comes down to how you learn, and what you're looking for out of the language. I'm analytical and don't mind learning things by rote, so of my recommendations are based on what worked for me.

Anyways, all that said, no book or CD set can give you "real conversation" practice that's essential to learning a language. I spent only 4 months in Italy, and my Italian improved more than it did during the previous 8 months of fairly intense studying. I'm sure you're busy, but if you could manage to meet a Spanish speaking person once a week for lunch to chat in Spanish I think it would be more valuable than any learning material you could buy.

Good luck!
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Thanks for all the advice. I agree, just speaking the language everyday will accelerate the learning process significantly. I guess the type of format I'm looking for is a combination of book, CD-ROM, and audio where I can listen perhaps on my i-pod.

I definitely would have trouble if I was just learning from a book. Also, I agree on the flashcards, very helpful.
 
Quote from Ivanovich:

It worked for Russian (Cyrillic). But I studied the alphabet first. I'm not saying you're wrong. What you say actually makes sense. But if you study the alphabet first, perhaps it'll work?
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If you can read Arabic I assume you can make it work, but for me I need to learn grammar so it sticks and be able to break apart the sentence.

Rosetta would show you a boy and then you would hear some Arabic and a translation that said "I am a Boy" No phonetic written sentence in English or breakdown of I or Boy, you just have to figure it out from hearing it over and over again. The Arabic has so many complicated consonant combinations I could not make them out from the voice. If it was written out in English phonetic I could follow but nothing but Arabic.

Just one opinion of course and I am glad it worked for you in Russian. I think local community college courses in languages are really cheap and you get hands on learning and are mostly in the evenings. Best value for real classroom learning.
 
Quote by Mamet:

"If you're looking for a refresher in German I would recommend the Pimsleur CDs. Somebody says (in english) "I walked to the store today", there's a pause, and then they'll repeat the phrase in German. They work their way up from basic sentences to more complicated ones, and slowly add new words. There are 30 half hour lessons per CD set. I think this would be a good way to remember the stuff you've forgotten."

Great post Mamet. In the past I've used Pimsleur as a stand alone approach and found them useful. The 30 half hour lessons are for their "Comprehensive" courses. The more popular languages have 2 or 3 levels of these courses which would make them total 60 or 90 lessons.

I also appreciate everyone's comments regarding Rosetta Stone as I was considering purchasing their material.

If one had the time & inclination I would take a course at a local community college as OptionCoach suggested along with Pimsleur. Pimsleur is convenient as you can listen to them while you commute. I also believe I learned more from Pimsleur Spanish 1 than I did in one year of high school Spanish.

Hope this helps,

ddgb2
 
I was just talking to guy on the Rosetta Stone spanish lessons. He actually learnt to speak spanish fluently from the course . I wanted to learn spanish for years and took a few night classes but nothing came of them
 
Quote from watchdaride:

I was just talking to guy on the Rosetta Stone spanish lessons. He actually learnt to speak spanish fluently from the course . I wanted to learn spanish for years and took a few night classes but nothing came of them
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I am sure people get good results from Rosetta. I just think to really speak and learn a language it has to be more than just mimicking phrases and structures which is a main part of Rosetta. Of course Rosetta goes into more detail than that so I am not trying to short-change them. I think for languages that are written out in English letters, and using the included guidebook you can learn really well from Rosetta.

But to truly speak a language you need to learn the grammar and vocab along with phrases and pronunciation. Sounds like Pimsleur does that and Berlitz used to do that but I never see their books and stuff anymore.

Learning a language is pretty fun and it is a shame more people do no try to do so, be it Rosetta, Pimsleur, local CC or any means.

Old joke:

What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages: trilingual
What about someone who speaks 2 languages: bilingual

What do you call someone who speaks 1 language: American.
 
Quote from Maverick74:

Thanks for all the advice. I agree, just speaking the language everyday will accelerate the learning process significantly. I guess the type of format I'm looking for is a combination of book, CD-ROM, and audio where I can listen perhaps on my i-pod.

I definitely would have trouble if I was just learning from a book. Also, I agree on the flashcards, very helpful.
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There are a lot of language podcasts on iTunes you might want to take a look in the iTunes store.

I also keep up with the languages I speak by going to the Yahoo! news in those languages and reading the news. Current events are a lot more interesting than reading from a book.
 
Pimsleur is pretty good. Rosetta Stone didn't really work well. Languages were a weak point and I found it easier to mix in several methods. Pimsleur for sentence structure, and some vocabulary CD's (can't remember the name but did vocabulary then used the list in a sentences). Renting movies in the target language is very helpful as well.

(edit: Learn in Your Car was the vocab series - helped me, put my wife to sleep)
 
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