Instant Immersion Language Lab

Rating:
Summary: Glorified picture dictionary
Review: I bought this CD-ROM specifically for the Arabic CD, but thought that learning some German, Korean, Japanese, and Greek would be fun. I already had some exprience with French and Spanish. And had previously bought the Instant Immersion Version of Italian. For the value of all 8 CD-ROMs it is not bad, but not great.

First let me tackle some of the positive aspects of this software. Note I was running this software on Windows XP and encountered no problems running the program. The exercises are easy and basically teach you basic words and phrases you might hear during your travels. So if you run into a person that speaks no English you might be able to remember to ask in Greek, french...what have you "Where is a hotel?" (Now understanding their answer might be a different problem). Each lesson has two tests for you to score points, easy and hard.

Now for the negative, I found that the tests/lessons were elementary...especially for the languages I have had experience with. This is not for people that wish to speak any of the languages in this package. I definitely recommend that you find another program that specifically teaches that one language. Another problem that I had is that when I started the Korean CD-ROM, it showed the Korean alphabet for the words. Yet when I was using the Arabic one, they used the roman alphabet for the arabic words spelled phonicially.

Over all recommendations for this product are: If you want to actually learn a language or have experience with a language, I don't recommend this product. However if your planning a trip to Europe and just want to learn a few words and phrases this product is a fun way of doing it.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to use, but....
Review: I bought this CD-ROM specifically for the Arabic CD, but thought that learning some German, Korean, Japanese, and Greek would be fun. I already had some exprience with French and Spanish. And had previously bought the Instant Immersion Version of Italian. For the value of all 8 CD-ROMs it is not bad, but not great.

First let me tackle some of the positive aspects of this software. Note I was running this software on Windows XP and encountered no problems running the program. The exercises are easy and basically teach you basic words and phrases you might hear during your travels. So if you run into a person that speaks no English you might be able to remember to ask in Greek, french...what have you "Where is a hotel?" (Now understanding their answer might be a different problem). Each lesson has two tests for you to score points, easy and hard.

Now for the negative, I found that the tests/lessons were elementary...especially for the languages I have had experience with. This is not for people that wish to speak any of the languages in this package. I definitely recommend that you find another program that specifically teaches that one language. Another problem that I had is that when I started the Korean CD-ROM, it showed the Korean alphabet for the words. Yet when I was using the Arabic one, they used the roman alphabet for the arabic words spelled phonicially.

Over all recommendations for this product are: If you want to actually learn a language or have experience with a language, I don't recommend this product. However if your planning a trip to Europe and just want to learn a few words and phrases this product is a fun way of doing it.

Rating:
Summary: Glorified picture dictionary
Review: I just receive the product and installed the Spanish language program. Basically you are given a menu of sorts which allows you to select a subject area such as "food", "parts of the body", "common phrases" etc. For each area you can browse pictures dealing with the subject area and hear people pronounce each word as you click on it. You can then take quizzes to test how well you recall the words.

While I don't necessarily believe that you need to be able to do 47 conjugations of every verb, (I can't even tell you what a subjunctive imperfect is in English and I can still speak it!) I had hoped for a little more comprehensive treatment of the language. The products from Transparent software although they don't go about teaching in a structured way either at least have the advantage of giving thousands of examples in the context of sentences and paragraphs for those who can learn inductively. This product will teach a bunch of words (mostly nouns) and a few common phrases but not a lot else.

I expect to make use of this product from time to time as a picture dictionary so it was probably worth the $9 I paid for it, but it would not have been worth much more.

Rating:
Summary: great help!!!!!!!!!!
Review: I think this software is a help because you can learn more languages. It is important to know other languages in the buisness woeld so you can talk to all clients.