Hi all
I have read many posts on this forum and HTLAL about the various 'generations' of the Living Language series, especially the excellent Ultimate series from the 1990s onwards. One series, however, that seems to have been overlooked is the Spoken World series which appear to be contemporary with both the Ultimate series up until the introduction of the Complete series. The only course of the Spoken World series that I have had a look at was Spoken World Farsi. My impression is that the Spoken World series are based on the methodology of the Ultimate series with dialogues and vocabulary lists but with less material. The smaller amount of material doesn't seem indicative of a 'dumbing down', more like an introduction to various languages that were not part of Ultimate series.
I would be interested in hearing opinions of this series as I'm interested in purchasing the Hindi and Irish courses. The only course of the Complete series that I own is Complete Russian. There is a note in the coursebook that the course has been adapted from Russian, The Basics. I'm assuming, however, that the Basics series is completely different to the Spoken World series and therefore Spoken World Irish and Spoken World Hindi would be different courses entirely from the Complete counterparts.
Since changing my email address, I have not been able to register with the HTLAL forum, so apologies if this has been covered previously. Would it be accurate to group the various Living Language courses in 'Generations' like the Assimil courses?
1st Generation (40s? to early-90s)
Living . . ., later Conversational . . .
French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew for English Speakers, as well as English for speakers of other languages.
Later Portuguese and Japanese, as well as an Advanced Conversation Manual for French, German, Italian and Spanish that covers verb usage.
Living . . . and Conversational . . . reviewed by Prof. Arguelles in his Foreign Language Learning Series as two separate series, but from I can determine they are two names for the same course.
2nd Generation (90s to early 2000s)
Ultimate Beginner and Ultimate Advanced
French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, English (presumably for Spanish speakers), Mandarin, Japanese
3rd Generation (mid-200s), arguably part of the 2nd Generation
Spoken World
Dutch, Thai, Farsi, Swahili, Irish, Polish, Korean, Tagalog, Croatian,
4th Generation (2010 onwards)
Complete . . .
French, German, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, English/ESL, Korean, Greek, Russian, Irish, Hindi, Arabic
Earlier editions of some of these languages were titled Complete . . . the Basics
Statistics: Posted by n_j_f — Fri Jan 22, 2016 7:12 am