Teach Yourself language guides

Has anyone used a Teach Yourself language guide? How, exactly, do you use it?

Teach Yourself Complete Filipino is my first experience with the series, and while I like it so far, I'm not sure that I'm using it to its full potential.

This is what I'm doing right now:

- reading through a lesson once, listening to the corresponding tracks on the CD (15ish mins)
- listening to the audio again in the car (15 mins, so 2 or 3 reps)
- reading through a lesson a second time, listening to the audio, and doing the written exercises (30ish mins)
- listening to the audio again in the car (15 mins, so 2 or 3 reps)
- reading through a lesson a third time, adding words and phrases to anki (15ish mins)

So in all, I'm spending about an hour and a half on a lesson, and doing one lesson per week. Once I've finished with a lesson, I review it periodically during my commute. So Monday and Tuesday I listen only to the new lesson, and Wednesday-Friday I'll cycle through all of the previous lessons.

I never get to the point where I memorize the dialogues. When I listen to a dialogue, I get the gist of it, but I can't always "hear" every single word unless I'm reading along with the text.

Thanks for any insight and suggestions,
S

Although I've got a couple TY courses laying around somewhere that I have never really used, the TY line was discussed on HTLAL in the past many times. What I seem to remember as general comments is that TY is grammar heavy, and Elexi I think it was emphasized that said grammar didn't really get explained more than once before moving on.

How I would use any dialogue-based course, or the dialogue component of a course, is the Assimil way. In fact I used Deutsche Welle's intro course like that, once I sliced out the English and music. The Assimil way is:

1. Listen to dialogue audio without the book
2. Listen to audio and look at base language (i.e. English)
3. Read target language aloud - make sure you understand meaning and compare L1 & L2 if necessary
   
4. Read L2/target language again without looking at L1
5. Listen to audio while looking at L1 (English)
6. Listen to audio while looking at L2/target
7. Listen again with book closed - should understand
8. Listen once more pausing audio after each sentence and repeat aloud
9. Read comments carefully
10. Read exercises - repeat each example sentence several times
11. Study examples of sentence structure

You do this with the book at home obviously, and then load the L2 only (Filipino for you here) onto your phone to listen to repeatedly on the go. Also, before beginning a new lesson, you go back and quickly read and listen to the previous 2-4 lessons.

I think if you do such a rigorous process above, the Assimil way, which takes about a half hour with typical Assimil length lessons (I don't know how long your dialogues are), you won't have difficulty understanding the dialogues away from home without the book. If you still do, then perhaps you first need some intro phonetic type course to distinguish the sounds of the language better.

Hope this helps.

This is exactly the kind of detailed suggestion that I was looking for! I've never tried Assimil (I learned Spanish using a hodgepodge mix of resources, and Assimil isn't available for Tagalog), but I've been intrigued by the program ever since I read about it on HTLAL. I think I'm going to try using TY the way that you describe, and then see how it goes. Thank you!

Glad to help. One thing to note which I assumed, is that the dialogues are entirely in the target language, with no English/base interspersed, like Assimil's. This is important, and hence why I edited the DW German course lessons in Audacity to remove all the English, as well as the couple minutes of classical language the lessons included. With Assimil, the only base language use is in the written material. Regarding that, the target and base dialogues are totally separate, and not interlinear which would negatively affect the use of same most likely since you probably wouldn't be able to keep from looking a little at the base translation when you're supposed to just be looking at the target language.

The TY course that I have has Tagalog-only dialogues. The only English is in the annoying introductions to each exercise/dialogue.

If you want to get rid of that English, then load each lesson into Audacity and cut it out and then save it. I usually save to a slightly different file name so as not to mess us the original, and would in fact copy the whole course into a new directory to use as a working directory anyway to avoid damaging the originals. If you use Audacity for this, you need to use the option to stretch out the sound graphs of peaks and troughs so that you can more easily grab sections to cut. Since it is all at the beginning of each lesson, you would listen to a lesson until the English is done, stop the playback and then cut out everything before that point and save.

I've gone through a few different TY courses for various languages. Once thing I've learned is that they vary WIDELY in their approach, depending on the language being taught.

They all have contained a good amount of grammar, but, as has been mentioned elsewhere, sometimes it's thrown on thick with no real reason. The Turkish course, while overall good, was this way. About half way through the course, all the sudden I was met with grammar not used in any dialogue, with seemingly no connection to anything. I ended up just concentrating on the dialogues (really just completing them alone to the end of the course), then going back and plodding through the grammar exercises at a much slower rate. The Polish course was a similar deal. The Norwegian and Afrikaans courses, on the other hand, were a breeze in comparison. I suppose I could chalk that up to their relative closeness to English, though.

R.
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Thank you! I have to admit that I've never used Audacity. I definitely see the value…but some of my multiple fatal flaws include "laziness" and "procrastination", so I'm not sure if/when I'll get around to it. Maybe in July when I'm off work for a month! In the meantime, I'll just fast forward through the English parts and listen to the Tagalog.

Thanks for sharing your experience! I'm mainly using Teach Yourself as a supplementary resource. My main resource is a textbook/workbook combo called "Tara, Mag-Tagalog Tayo". It was created for classroom use, but it's very clear and well laid-out for independent learners. It has some flaws - a lack of transcripts, for one - but the grammar explanations are clear, logical and build upon one another. So I'm not really looking to Teach Yourself as a grammar resource. I mainly wanted another source of audio and input. Today I tried one of the dialogues using an Assimil-like approach, and found it *extremely* useful. I'm going to keep experimenting and see what I end up with.

Ah, no. You don't want to open your MP3 version in Audacity -- you want to import it straight from the CD, so that you don't lose quality due to multiple compressions (you know how some illegal files sound like they're being played in a metal tank full of water? That's because it's an MP3 that's been recompressed multiple times).

I feel like I am missing something here, or that you didn't read the purpose of the process .

The idea is to edit the MP3 and get rid of the English. This necessitates opening it in Audacity or a similar program, regardless of re-compression when being resaved. Getting rid of the English is worth taking a hit, to me at least.

Yes, but if you start with the CD audio rather than a ripped MP3 of it, it's uncompressed digital audio to start with. Stelle has the CDs. If you don't... yar, that be yer own choice, me heartie....

If you're on Windows, instead of Audacity I would recommend mp3DirectCut because it doesn't decompress and then encode the file. It's also easier and quicker to use for this type of simple editing.

You're making unfounded assumptions mate. Note I used the example of the Deutsche Welle course I used. One downloads mp3 files from their website, so there is no CD. The only other course I have done this to partially, is an older cassette based course which I own. That is the real recipe for bad quality, transferring cassette to a computer file and then editing and re-saving same.

But you are right that if one is going from CD to begin with, then loading the song directly from CD into Audacity is the way to go.

Audacity defaults to a high quality conversion rate. Especially with voice only recordings, the 128K sampling rate doesn't really lose much in terms of quality if anything. Also, the ability to post-process the audio is an advantage from my perspective. Certainly the time savings for eliminating English from audio can be helpful if the recording is something you will use multiple times.

I appreciate Perigrenus' detailed response. Saves me a lot of typing