Elexi wrote:
Yeah, I made a mistake ascribing Dutch: an essential grammar to Donaldson. I was referring to William Shetter's Routledge book. However, Stern's Essential Dutch Grammar is cheap and an excellent 'stripped to the bone' grammatical work that will provide everything you need for the first few years. I would go for this one to start with.
I own both Linguaphone courses - living in England getting second hand Linguaphone courses off ebay is quite easily as there are a lot around. The newer 1980s version is far superior to the 1950s course by far. Whoever says it is 'not that thorough' has obviously never seen it. I think generally there are people have watched an Alexander Arguelles video who then get it into their head that the way to sound knowledgeable about Language learning courses is to follow the 'old course is best course', without having actually seen the courses. Well that may be the case with Assimil but it is not always the case, especially with Linguaphone courses. I don't remember the negative reviews from the old site - can you link them? Then I can address them.
The 'new' Linguaphone course audio has 8 CDs of about 1 hour each - all in Dutch (including the exercises) - it is broken down into short dialogues (this is the big difference compared to the 1970s courses) with lots of exercises and vocabulary lists after it. Actually, I would say it is more similar to the two Living Language Ultimate courses put together, rather than the 1970s Linguaphone courses.
Still, unless one gets the Linguaphone second hand, the Colloquial Dutch 1 and Colloquial Dutch 2 by Donaldson cover the same ground and are 'take no prisoners' courses that contain a huge amount of information. So if you like the format of the Colloquial courses, they are cheaper and just as good. I would recommend the Spoken World first though.
Elexi, thanks for your thorough reply! As always, it is appreciated. I am most happy to read that the Stern $7 solution should work for me, haha. Interestingly, when going back to look up the two Colloquial courses, I noticed there is a 2nd edition that came out in October 2015 here, but a 3rd edition that will come out in a few months here. So I am tempted to hold off entirely on Colloquial and see how substantive the new update is. If it isn't great, I imagine the 2nd edition may get a bit cheaper.
I tried to refind all the Linguaphone Dutch references from the old site, but only found a handful:
Post 9 says it is a bit dry.
Post 1 makes it sound dissimilar to other Linguaphone courses. So I was unsure if it was a case where a most recent version was rather different from older kinds, which I had read happened with the newest versions of French and Spanish Linguaphone.
Post 11 here references it being quite good and indicates it has 45 lessons. Does this sound like the version you are familiar with? And, is it the same course shown here? If so, I think I may just go ahead and get it since that seems like a very reasonable price considering the amount of content.
Statistics: Posted by diplomaticus — Sat Apr 02, 2016 2:53 pm