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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
really disappointing!, 7 April 2007
Today I purchased this "Audiobook" and I have to say that I am really disappointed, it's just a waste of money! Unfortunately, I hadn't asked in the shop if I could open the foil to have a closer look at it.
To be more specific, a few points of criticism:
- the audio quality of the Danish words is poor, sometimes you really have to concentrate a lot to get to hear the word correctly. It sounds as if the speaker sat behind a wall or used a cheap microphone. The whole intonation and recording is so dull and uninspiring that you are more than happy to switch it off after two minutes.
Additionally, there's nothing to indicate when a word pair starts, i.e. if you are a beginner you will quickly get confused as to whether you are listening to word pairs of the Danish-English part or the English-Danish part.
- there are 4 CDs in the package. Each CD contains the audio recordings for the words of the following groups: nouns, adjectives & adverbs, expressions and verbs. Have you ever seen a language course where you first learn all the nouns, then all the adjectives & adverbs, etc.?
- on each CD the words are in complete random order and - believe it or not - they even call this a special feature (in the accompanying booklet): "... is the random order in which the words and expressions are presented, as would occur in actual conversation. This intentional arrangement of word order makes the program more challenging, promoting faster learning and increased word retention". In my opinion (my professional background is in Computer-Assisted Language Learning), this is absolute nonsense! How can you learn anything better if not any two following words are related to each other? In addition, this package does not offer any exercises, tests or further materials (like simple texts)? In an actual conversation, you would certainly not change your topic from one word or sentence to the next, would you?
- on the cover it is written that Level One "Presents over 2500 commonly used words and expressions". Even without listening to all the audio recordings, it can easily be calculated that this number is quite exaggerated! I listened, however, to a number of samples to check that there is no "hidden" content on the CDs not being mentioned in the accompanying booklet.
So, by roughly counting the words in the accompanying booklet you get a totally different number of words: the booklet has 35 pages of bilingual wordlists, each page contains at most 40 word pairs (only where there are no section titles or additional info). So this totals up to less than 1400 words per language. Again, it is totally random where to find any words, for example some days of the week are in the Danish-English part, the other days of the week are in the English-Danish part, there's no system at all. If you want to listen to a certain word (again), you have to manually search for it.
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