As a linguist, I get a letter or message about once a month asking me what the best way is to learn a foreign language at home. I always answer “The Magic Books
,” by which I mean the wonderful Assimil series. I’ve been giving people Assimil sets for 20 years now. It’s the With Ease series you may have seen—Russian with Ease, Dutch with Ease, and so on.
These are some of my favorite Christmas gifts because they’re the only self-teachers I know that work. In just 20 minutes a day—if you do exactly what they tell you to with the books and accompanying recordings—then presto! You will be talking like, roughly, an unusually cosmopolitan three-year-old. No, you won’t be “conversing like a native” the way the ad copy says, unless you already are one, which would presumably make one’s use of the set somewhat peculiar. And, they can only give you so much vocabulary. But the magic is that you will be able to carry on a decent conversation, instead of just being able to count to 100 and say things like “My uncle is a lawyer but my aunt has a spoon.”
. . . Fluent? Of course not, nothing can get you there short of speaking the language all day for months. But at least I could converse sparklingly with toddlers, while faking it well with everybody else, instead of quietly hoping somebody would ask me what kind of silverware my aunt had.
[Note: for those wanting to learn Arabic, this is the only one he says he doesn’t recommend.]
Thanks for this!
What a timely post, as I was toying with the idea of learning some basic Spanish.
Susan – a good site for this is SpanishDict.com. This is completely free and has exceptional teaching. It has a Phrasebook, links to various media sites in Spanish. We’ve been using this in conjunction with a tutor (from Colombia) and it has been helpful.
I learned Arabic with Assimil, but in French. I didn’t even know Assimil also had English books. The French Arabic book was not too bad, I thought.
If we define “home” as “home country” and not as “the building I live in” than an even better complement to hitting the books is going out and finding someone from that country and make friends! It may be hard to find a Thai or Farsi speaker in the cornfields of Iowa but you’d be surprised at how many foreigners live in at least a medium sized town or city.
… any suggestions on a good Arabic set for English speakers?
Would you recommend this series for learning Urdu (assuming it’s even available), since the written language shares quite a bit with Arabic?