Customer Reviews

Verbal Advantage, Vols. 1-3

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

 

 

From their advertisement pitch ("a program that feeds words effortlessly into your memory... you'll be able to use hundreds of new words in hours..."), one would think that they'd used some cutting edge psychology techniques (such as NLP, conditioning, etc) to aid your learning. But you'll be disappointed when you discover that the author did little more than reading from the dictionary.

Here's the format for every word on the tape: 1) author reads the vocabulary 2) he spells it 3) reads the definition and sometimes the origin of the word 4) reads the synonyms and sometimes antonyms (which he did not bother to spell. So if you didn't know the synonyms to being with, you can't even look them up in a dictionary) 5) often he gives some example of usage.

With exception of #5 above, there's nothing you can't get from reading the dictionary like Rain Man does. At least, when you read from a dictionary, you don't have to keep rewinding the damn thing to catch the synonyms you missed.

Each verbal advantage set comes with 2 tapes. The author spent half of the 1st tape introducing the program, telling you why you should learn vocabularies. He then spent half of the 2nd tape explaining how to read from a dictionary. Okay, so you say "I don't know why I should learn more words and I never used a dictionary before." You'll be surprised when you open Verbal Advantage level 2, and discovers the EXACT same repetition of the introduction and how to read dictionaries.

You might learn a lot of other things from these tapes... but you definitely will not learn a lot of new words.

This is the fourth tape I had, but it is the only one that I like. The tape explains words and presents several usages. The other tapes were (1) very annoying because they containing too much useless, annoying dialogue and few new words or (2) not helpful because the definition and usage were poorly crafted.

If you prefer useless chatting between annoying people, try Word Smart II; you will spend very long time listening to their uninformative conversation. If you simply want to learn as much words in a short period of time, get this set of tape.

After the first 10 min or so, I can no longer give my full attention to what I hear. Not possible to really remember all the words while many words are not used in the real world. Nice to know but will forget soon enough.