Instant Immersion 33 Languages

Rating:
Summary: Okay for the price
Review: I was hoping this set would contain the first CD or at least part of the first CD in the two-CD Instant Immersion programs, which would have been a great deal, and would have truly given you a good start in all these languages. However, this set only has very basic material for each language, and in fact is more like having a basic CD vocabulary and phrasebook for each language rather than a real mini-course or introduction, which for me is only marginally useful.

The vocabulary sections are divided up into 8 sections: first words, colors, food, numbers, shopping, countries, time, body. The ninth section is for phrases, and one advantage is that they are pronounced individually for you, which you can do for the individual words, too. There are two categories of games, easy and hard, and the program tracks your progress.

If you like to collect lots of phrase books with basic vocabulary, this might be fine for you, as you can at least learn some words and phrases that might be useful, but for me the major shortcoming is there is nothing on the grammar. I would rather invest the money in the 2-CD version of the half dozen languages I'm interested in, and then pay the extra for the 5 and 8 CD advanced Instant Immersion software when I'm ready to progress to the next stage of learning.

Still, for a reasonable price you get 33 languages, including all the main European ones plus things like Swahili, Korean, Finnish, Hindi, Tibetan, Vietnamese, and so on. So if you like to play around with exotic languages this might be the set for you, but you'll need to supplement it with a real language learning course if you're serious about really going anywhere with your studies.

I need to mention one drawback to the CD's, however. I have reasonably fast, 16x read and 48x write speed CD, and the program still runs fairly slowly, although I have a half gig of RAM and a 2.6 GHz system. It's mostly noticeable when using the pronunciation capability, but it spends a lot of time just seeking when you're jumping between sections. It's tolerable on my CD player, but if you have an older, slower one, be advised it's going to be slow.

One solution would be to get Tenebril software's Virtual Drive Manager program which will copy it to your hard disk so you can run it from there. I've tested it on about a dozen programs and it works on most of them. So it's not a sure thing but the program isn't that expensive and it does work for many things. Tenebril can be found on the web, where I bought it. I don't know if their software is carried by most computer stores or not.

Rating:
Summary: Instant maybe. Immersion questionable.
Review: My dad got this for me to supplement a Latin textbook I have been studying for my high school language course. It is quick and easily understandable. You get plenty of words and phrases, which is perfect for a traveler. If you want to learn the language for the sake of knowing it, not travel, however, you'd better get a book to supplement this. It doesn't teach about pluralization, verb conjugation, or other oddities that the language holds, such as, in Latin, the ending -m which implies a direct object. The Latin CD also does not use the dashes over the vowels (ie. â,ç,î,ô,û). Overall, I am very happy with the product and with the price of $39.99 (USD), but I am also quite glad I have my textbook (ECCE ROMANI) to go with it.