A couple users asked about TL in another thread so I thought I would research it a little. I have somewhere laying around a copy of their Latin Now program that I bought 20 years ago or so. I already knew Latin grammar moderately well and played around with it but never completed it. It had a lot of reading texts, grammar notes, speech recognition, etc. I think it was priced back then in the USD$79 range. Here is a website with some screenshots from the old products of series, this one showing German. I thought it was a nice piece of software and really like the text based aspect of it. From looking at the the Transparent Language website, and the wikipedia article on the company (obviously written by them), there is no mention of the old products, though they can be had cheaply on ebay and amazon. Their current product seems quite different, but perhaps it is based on the old method (more on this later). They currently have the following: Subscription based online course for $16.99+/month Complete edition series for various languages for $179.95, which they say contains 2000+ words and phrases (and might be based on old course) Transparent Connect which is live tutoring Everywhere Audio Course for $49.95, which seems like the bookless audio courses of other publishers BYKI deluxe (before you know it) for $69.95, which is flashcard software + a mobile edition Essentials series for $79.95, probably the typical stripped down version of the more complete series for each langauge KidsSpeak(tm) which is, duh, for kids Looking at screen shots from google images while searching for "Transparent Language" plus a language, I cannot determine if the images containing longer texts are only from the old series or also the new. So I can't really give it a true review. They have a methodology page where they tout their "declarative method" to which they add technology to get "declarative acceleration", supposedly based on the way the brain works where declarative memory processes vocab and phrases, and procedural memory processes grammar. That page contains a link to the 5 principles of effective second language acquisition, where they mention comprehensible input and limit early output (i.e. input hypothesis). Curiously they cite Nation, Waring and others on vocabulary but not Krashen on the whole. I checked out the page for the subscription based online course, which seems to give access to all their products for a given language. It is about $29/month on a monthly basis to $16/month if you pay a year's subscription in advance. I was intrigued when I saw an "all language pack" option in the list of languages and clicked on it. The cheapest option for same is $83.33 a month which works out to a whopping $1,000 for a year paid up front. This is obviously oriented at corporate/government/library customers as is much of their product focus, but it seems a ludicrous price point for individual users. Since it is web based presumably one cannot download any of the elements and would need to keep subscribing to use it. But how can an individual user really use much more than would be provided by 2 or 3 courses. If for say a 2 or 3 times multiple of the normal single language subscription one could just try any of them out to whatever level desired, they might have a real temptation for individuals around here who study multiple langs and like to wander around languages. In summary I can't give a true review of their current offerings, but I too was curious as to what they were doing. They have survived when many other language publishers have not. If anyone has used their current products (or their old ones), please feel free to add your own review.
I mentioned TL. I saw a video a few years ago showing a TV demonstration of an early DOS TL version alongside an early Rosetta Stone version. I myself had already used the Transparent Language "101 Languages of the World" package, and it struck me that the interface and the content was really very little different in both cases, except for the lack of sound files, as you may well expect on a package that predates the popularity of the CD ROM. Like Peregrinus, I haven't seen the latest online version. I went to their website where they claimed to have a demonstration video, but it turned out to have no demonstration whatsoever of the actual course, so I can't verify how much their current offering corresponds to their old one. The original methodology was driven by two main things: dialogues and wordlists. The dialogues are typically presented monolingually, and you can click on words and phrases to see a translation. Once you've "studied" the dialogue, you then get the opportunity to "take part", which means one half of the dialogue is given and you have to respond as the other person. There are a few simple vocabulary games, but there is no real attempt to track and correct your errors. Furthermore, the dialogues are split by situations, and you only get one in each situation, so there's no real revision. The 101 Languages of the World package can be picked up on Amazon for around the cost of 2 months of the basic subscription of TL on-line, and it's yours forever. Amazon UK even has a few copies for £6.99. It's worth having a copy if you're going to be learning lots of language, but don't go expecting too much. I was taking a business trip to Norway, and I rattled through the Norwegian material in a few hours on the train to the airport. I didn't do the exercises or anything as they seemed a little pointless, and I didn't really learn much at all. But hey-ho. So no, not all that much material. Not a lot of variation, and pure repetition doesn't really get you anywhere. Most of the 101 languages of the title are from the "Vocabulary of the World" series, so you won't even get any grammar or large phrases. But if you can get it cheap enough, why not?
That is the frustrating thing about their website. Usually vendors are happy to provide ample screenshots demonstrating all facets of a program, whether via a series of still images or in a vid. There is a 7 day trial version of the online offering, but I am not interested enough to register and possibly get spammed daily thereafter (like Learning Spanish Like Crazy does -excellent product but you get spammed hard to your grave).
During my first attempt to learn French, I used some TL add-on titles, which were on DVDs. They consisted of dialogues, or excerpts from books, magazines, and films, and had audio with transcripts. You could click on any word in the transcript to check the meaning. The reading levels ranged from A2 to B2. You could also read the transcript as a cloze, with different words deleted every time you did a cloze. You were working against the clock to get points, so it was a bit like a primitive video game. I found the cloze feature useful in that it got me reading and listening on a phrase level, and it focused me on collocations. But this product has disappeared - I suppose there is no market for it now that there are so many podcasts. More recently I tried the 7 day trial for their online Farsi course. It is very different from their old product. The lessons are very linear and are based on short dialogues, which are followed by lots of very controlled activities for practicing vocab and putting together sentences (matching/ordering/completion/etc). The layout is clear and easy to use, and the audio is very good quality. Overall, it is decent course with clear objectives, and is mildly entertaining, but it is fairly expensive and doesn't seem to go very far (high A1/low A2), but perhaps they are planning on adding more to courses that get lots of subscribers.
I signed up for the 7 day trial after lunch. I spent a couple of hours in the Swedish course, taking extensive notes. Then I switched to the German course... and there are some pretty noticeable differences between languages in terms both of size/content and the tasks set. Overall, I'm not impressed, and I certainly can't see how they justify the price they're asking (except in that their biggest competitor is also stupidly expensive). I'll look at a couple of other languages and get back with a detailed review in a few days.
OK, here's a first go. NB: I use L1 to refer to your first language (in my case English) and TL to refer to the target language you are learning. The current Transparent Languages offering is a web-based product using Flash. This means that you can't use the webpage under iOS (iPad, iPhone) and as far as I can see, there is no native iOS client available. (Transparent offer their Before-You-Know-It flashcard software for iOS, but there are better flashcard apps available anyway.) From what I've seen, there are 3 different versions of the "Basic Essentials" course software, with the most popular languages running ver 3, and some of the less popular languages running v2 or v1. BV3 requires flash player 11.4 or later, which is a problem if you're a Linux user, as Adobe stopped supporting Linux after v11.2. Grr... Anyway, Basic Essentials v3 comprises of 10 units, each of 5 lessons. Each lesson consists of 10 exercises. They start with a "Conversation Preview" (listen to and read a dialogue, with parallel L1 translation in text), followed by a "Language Comparison" (phrases and language fragments taken from or related to the dialogue, with your L1 beside them) and followed by "Preview It" which is looking at flashcards with both L1 and TL visible, and listening to the TL. These are exactly the same phrases as in the "Language Comparison", in exactly the same order -- ie you do the same thing twice, just with a different interface. Note that the conversation that has been "previewed" is often never repeated after the language has been learnt. When it is, it is in the form of an exercise called Conversation Practice (Say) that does not involve active recall, as you get to see the TL and the L1 translation - and hear the TL - before being asked to record it. The complexity varies wildly between languages. With a reasonable beginner's level of German, I ran through the first unit in little over 15 minutes. But with Russian, which I have done a small amount of study on too, it took me over an hour to complete the first unit. (And that was even with me cheating and claiming "I knew that" to some wrong answers in the later exercises, just to try to end the boredom.) Part of this is of course down to the relative difficulty of the two languages, but much more of it is just down to the choice of material. For comparison, here are the first dialogues from the German course, and then the Russian course (using the site's own English translation for clarity): Regardless of the individual languages, it should be pretty clear how different all the verbs are. Past, present and imperative in the second, but all present in the first. Now, the German first unit had me typing out phrases no longer than "Ich heiße Claudia" on my keyboard, but in Russian, I was expected to write out sentences of over 20 letters using a pick-a-letter system that slows you down to about one second per letter... not great. The platform supports multiple activity types, which are used in various combinations in different lessons. Among these are the usual: L1->TL flashcards; TL->L1 flashcards; read out what you see; type what you hear etc. Other things get a little bit... questionable, pedagogically speaking. They have "fridge magnet" type exercises called "Sentence Unscramble", but when you're dealing with 2- or 3-word phrases, they look really stupid, particularly given that this means that a notable proportion of your phrases will be in the correct order to begin with. And if it's a sentence, the capitalisation of the first word in the sentence is usually a big clue (less so in German, of course). There's a multiple choice exercise called "four square", where four "cards" are laid out. One by one, you see and hear a TL word/phrase/sentence on each card, becfore it is turned over. When the final card is hidden, you get an L1 prompt, with you then have to find the TL equivalent to from memory. It's far too easy to make errors for reasons other than language.
Now, there are some good points in this software -- it does tend to force revision of failed items, but on the downside, it seems to do so only within the given exercise. All exercises in a unit are built on the same set of phrases, so remembering across exercises would be more robust. Furthermore, while some exercise types make a point of accounting for both the question you got wrong and the wrong answer (thus actively dealing with your individual confusions), other exercise types don't. There are several bugs in the software, too. Once, my browser crashed. When I reopened, it took me to the last exercise I had completed. Fine, I thought, I'll just redo this. But after almost 10 minutes I realised that it wasn't going to finish -- as I had already completed the exercise, it was in a sort of "practice mode", and was just going to go on until I stopped it. Twice I've had an exercise fail to complete because the percentage score just stopped going up (once at 96%, once at 94%). Get an answer wrong and it would go down, but when it got back to the point it was stuck at, it got stuck again. The voice recording applet is buggy too. There are two different microphone tests (for some reason, some of the exercises use one, the others use the other -- I think this is because some of the exercises were carried over from V1, and some are new in V2 or V3). One of them asks you to say "testing 1, 2, 3" and seems OK (normally) and the other gives you a visual volume bar and says to adjust your volume until your speaking voice makes the bar go green... except the bar never moves for me. When using the voice recognition, sometimes my recordings get speeded up about 8 times, and of course the algorithm marks that wrong. With V2 (Swedish), this was happening to about 50% of my attempts, and it got very, very tiresome. It was far less frequent in V3 today.
