Customer Reviews

Read My Lips! Lipreading Video Lessons (Boxed Set 1-6) Learn to Listen with your Eyes!

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I'm losing my hearing to an unusual inner-ear disease, and I'm taking a course on SPEECH READING (what used to be called lip reading). One of my biggest needs, and fortunately the only thing I need from this DVD, is practice. This set of 6 DVDs does offer that.

Now for a couple of "howevers."

Personally, I don't think this is a good "starting point" for a beginner to learn speech reading. Why? Because there are a few different methods, it's a very subjective skill to learn and I feel nothing replaces a qualified teacher to get you going. While some people seem to have a wonderful, natural talent for it, most of us do not. Having our language "dissected" and explained by an instructor who is monitoring your progress is definitely the way to get started.

Because there is movement that is not part of the word (deep mouth breaths before some words -- unnecessary smiles after), and occasional dropped or rushed syllables, and head movement, I would rather have had the option to turn off and on the voices simply by using my volume control. When I'm having a problem with, say, the name "Jennifer," I would have dearly loved to have heard what actual sounds were recorded. My hearing is not totally gone (just bad and getting worse). I certainly don't need the distracting music track (which I have muted) that has replaced the voices. No cheating, now.. eh?

PLEASE, we're fairly grown-up. We do understand that if you cheat at solitaire, you're only cheating yourself. The same applies to this series. Give users the option to listen or not. I would have loved to hear what kind of accents might have affected the pronunciations.

Finally, this series of DVDs looks like it's about 3 or 4 generations away from the original production, which looks like it was shot with a home video camera.

Really, this would be a bargain at $49 or even at $89... But to pay $200 for this... Unless you really need a practice "partner" to be available on your schedule, you might want to think twice at this price.