Customer Reviews

Dutch: Language 30

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book that comes with the cassettes contains many helpful phrases (especially for the traveler), as well as some basic vocabulary. Upon review of the phrase book with my native Dutch friend, however, we found some of the phoenetic translations to be inaccurate and confusing. In a few cases, the pronunciation interpretation was exactly the same as the Dutch word which I didn't find very helpful. For instance, the word for "rice" is spelled "rijst" in Dutch and the pronunciation was given as "rijst". Hmmm... I need a little more of a road map. In another instance, "chocolate", spelled as "chocolade" is translated to be pronounced as "shoh-koh-lah", and according to my friend, the end part of the word is missing... it should be: "shoh-koh-lah-de". In all honesty, I haven't checked out the cassettes, but in my opinion, an easily understandable book is imperative since it is something that one would rely upon while "on the road"! I am in search of a better reference with more phrases and easily decipherable pronunciations.

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.

I have used this product for learning basics for both Dutch and Mandarin Chinese. I love it! At first it was tough but it creates the patterns in the brain you need to be able to speak with correct word orders. It also gives you word and sentence inflections.

It is important to use other programs, books etc to acquire vocabulary but this program is a great tool to get started.

Play the audio while biking,driving, walking etc! Listen and repeat it over and over! It is so very important to not expect immediate results! It really works!

Dutch is an interesting language, and this Language/30 product is not bad. It could be better, though. I have learned from this program, but it is not the only source that I rely on. Two native speakers recite the language--a man and a woman. The man's voice is not well suited to language learning because he has a deep voice and does not speak clearly. The woman's voice is fine, though--it is higher and clear. The sounds are the essential part of the language, and it would have been better had both speakers not spoken so fast. A facet of this program that is helpful is that the target phrases are spoken twice. The book that comes with the two cassettes contains a section that consists of three pages of basic Dutch grammar. This Language/30 product does not provide the basics of the language, but I still use it and consider it to have some merit. It has given me an idea of what the Dutch language is like. Actually, I rate it 2.5 stars.

I found the tapes to be very useful, and the pronunciation examples went over extremely well with my Dutch friends I tried them out on. You're not going to learn to speak fluent Dutch from these tapes, but you should be able to say "good morning" and "thank you" and ask for directions to the train station after listening to these tapes.

I AM a linguist, I've studied a lot of germanic languages and historical linguistics and phonology, so your mileage may vary -I didn't use the books much but chose to listen to the tapes since that's how I learn best.