Greek: Language 30 (Language 30)

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding & Easy to Use Training Aid
Review: Language 30: Greek, is an outstanding tool for travelers planning to visit Greece. The native speakers on the audio tapes are excellent models. Several times I was mistaken as a native speaker while traveling in the Greek islands and Peloponnese after using this course. The study aid is easy to use. Two audio tapes follow the provided phrase book verbatim, a big plus; no flipping through pages trying to match up the audio with the printed information. The pocket size phrase book is formatted in a straight forward manner which allows it to be referred to with ease and speed if you need a quick refresher.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding & Easy to Use Training Aid
Review: Language 30: Greek, is an outstanding tool for travelers planning to visit Greece. The native speakers on the audio tapes are excellent models. Several times I was mistaken as a native speaker while traveling in the Greek islands and Peloponnese after using this course. The study aid is easy to use. Two audio tapes follow the provided phrase book verbatim, a big plus; no flipping through pages trying to match up the audio with the printed information. The pocket size phrase book is formatted in a straight forward manner which allows it to be referred to with ease and speed if you need a quick refresher.

Rating:
Summary: It works!
Review: This course is excellent. I was originally trying to learn Greek with Hugo's Greek in Three Months, but when after 4 months I was not even halfway through, I decided I'd try Language 30. This was a very smart thing to do. I listened to the tapes every day for three months. .By the time I got to Greece 3 months later, I was able to say everything I needed to say and understand everything I needed to understand. I was amazed. I had no problems, even in remote areas where no English is spoken. My Greek neighbors at home tell me my pronunciation is excellent. The good thing about the course is that if you decide to study Greek seriously after your trip, you already have a lot of practice using proper grammar and a seemingly instinctive knowledge of sentence patterns. If you're planning to study Modern Greek in the fall, you could spend 22 minutes a day all summer listening to one side of each tape and have a huge head start that would no doubt make you the star of the class. Since each side is only 22 minutes long, it's not too difficult to squeeze in a few minutes of study that would otherwise be wasted. I found that I retained more if I listened to one side of one tape until I could respond quickly to at least 50% of the exercises before moving on to the next side of the tape. I listened to the tapes on my Walkman while on the treadmill at the gym and studied the phrasebook while I rode the subway to and from work, so learning Greek did not take up a lot of my time. I would recommend this course very highly for travelers and for students. It gets five stars from me.

Rating:
Summary: It works!
Review: This course is excellent. I was originally trying to learn Greek with Hugo's Greek in Three Months, but when after 4 months I was not even halfway through, I decided I'd try Language 30. This was a very smart thing to do. I listened to the tapes every day for three months. .By the time I got to Greece 3 months later, I was able to say everything I needed to say and understand everything I needed to understand. I was amazed. I had no problems, even in remote areas where no English is spoken. My Greek neighbors at home tell me my pronunciation is excellent. The good thing about the course is that if you decide to study Greek seriously after your trip, you already have a lot of practice using proper grammar and a seemingly instinctive knowledge of sentence patterns. If you're planning to study Modern Greek in the fall, you could spend 22 minutes a day all summer listening to one side of each tape and have a huge head start that would no doubt make you the star of the class. Since each side is only 22 minutes long, it's not too difficult to squeeze in a few minutes of study that would otherwise be wasted. I found that I retained more if I listened to one side of one tape until I could respond quickly to at least 50% of the exercises before moving on to the next side of the tape. I listened to the tapes on my Walkman while on the treadmill at the gym and studied the phrasebook while I rode the subway to and from work, so learning Greek did not take up a lot of my time. I would recommend this course very highly for travelers and for students. It gets five stars from me.

Rating:
Summary: Not a bad value, but a bit tedious
Review: This set is a decent value. For your money, you get a fairly broad range of phrases and vocabulary. However, the organization of information assumes that you can keep interest listening to a bunch of discrete phrases repeated one after the other with no conversations or anything remotely natural. If you can, in fact, maintain interest while listening to these tapes repeatedly, then you'll do well with this set. If, on the other hand, you need something more dynamic, you might do well to look elsewhere.