Hugo: Foreign Language Learning Series Reviews

Alexander Arguelles presents a series of video reviews and demonstrations of those foreign language learning series that he has found most useful in his own studies. For further information about the series, please refer to http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/index.html

Category:

Education

Tags:

• polyglottery
• polyglots
• foreign
• language
• learning
• Hugo

[DrMurphy65]

Good review.

Personally, I am not a fan of the Hugo ****** in three month courses. Like aforementioned, they're very dry and dull. I prefer the interactivity that you get from courses such as Michel Thomas and Linguaphone. I always start with audio and then begin to use a reading technique. I have the French and Italian courses in Hugo, which I found quite useful AFTER having listened to audio tapes of said languages. I would say for me audio tapes and then writing and grammar books, that order.

[ProfASAr]

@DrMurphy65 That is pretty much exactly what I do: first work with a Linguaphone or Assimil type course, then through a Hugo's type course, then move on either to a more detailed reference grammar for a difficult language, or on to reading for an easier one.

[DrMurphy65]

@ProfASAr Don't you find that Assimil requires some knowledge of the language? I find it too difficult to understand and need previous learning to find them effective.

[ProfASAr]

@DrMurphy65 No, quite honestly, I do not find that Assimil type courses require any prior knowledge...

[Jonzwelet]

As usual, most helpfully informative for all language learners. Thank you so much for taking the time to make these for us!

[MySilverr]

Thank you. Very good upload. I love the Hugo series and have studied their French books, cassettes and the on the move series. Thanks for great upload.

[DrMurphy65]

@ProfASAr Fair play, each to their own. I have the Catalan version and couldn't make heads or tails of it until I had done other Catalan courses.

[archa000]

I have Spanish, Italian and Japanese "In 3 months". They all are good - has very simplified grammar, some good exercises and dialogues and vocabulary list that actually is in context of the lesson. The only thing problem with the Japanese book, is that is gives minimal Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji - it's all Romaji.

[Guitarscreech06]

I took one single course of german in high school. Remembering the most of it, I got the HUGO: In Three Months for Dutch. Been using it for 2 months, 30 minutes a day, and I'm somewhere near intermediate (already having a bigger vocabulary and sense of word interpretation than what I got from german in school).

If you're looking for a course with only language CD:s, then Pimsleur is better, but WAY more expensive and demanding (so much more material to plow through, all on CD w/ no book)

[jmichaelrout]

This was by far my favorite course for studying German. I only used the older "German Simplified" one, and I actually enjoy doing grammar translation exercises. I did nothing but grammar translations for an hour everyday and then read aloud what I'd translated and at the end of a couple of months I found that the fluidity of my speech had improved dramatically. Seeing these videos makes me miss those days. I have ordered the books for Italian, French, and Russian though. =)

[xnightxamex]

i didnt expect it initially but this course is amazing!! at least, for people like me who need grammatical explainations to function. im working through french in 3 months and its been amazingly helpful in figuring out whats going on in the language.