Fluenz Review

[Alarico Boyett]

Dependingon which particular program you choose to follow, there are two to five Levels of study, with thirty lessons on each level. These lessons mimic a classroom, and are headed by a tutor. While the classroom feel might not be for everyone, I feel that this really enables the learner to feel motivated and encouraged to progress to the next set of lessons.

There are some fantastically useful functions, like that of the subtitles. You will ordinarily listen three times to a sentence, with the option of subtitles, which really helps to get the language into your head. It is always much more useful to learn in a variety of ways, and even something so simple as having the words to read on screen while you associate them with an image and are speaking them yourself is the sort of thing that gives this course an edge.

Absolutely suitable for both beginners and those looking to brush up on their language skills, Fluenz takes a very different approach to a lot of language courses. Instead of simply working on vocabulary lists, or using picture association techniques, the emphasis is very clearly on a more cohesive approach.

Choosing not to focus on these tried and tested means of language learning, Fluenz tries to give the learner the intellectual tools that they need in order to construct and deconstruct sentences, and therefore the language, themselves.

Though this is a very stylish looking program, and one of the few products of this sort clearly geared up for more use on a Mac than a PC, Fluenz will not, as the name suggests, made you fluent in whatever language you have chosen to study.

My rating is 4.5. Because nothing gets rated at 100% perfect or 0% worthless. It takes work and effort but is the best language course I ever tried. (have tried several!!) And it proved to be valuable while traveling in Panama. If a 66 year old can learn, you people can do it! Recommend paying attention to Sonjas suggestions to increase your spanish on your own too.

Fluenz is a lecture style language program that performs like a first-rate individual tutor leading you progressively through the comprehension of Spanish. The issue is that it is awkward to arrive at several topics or subtopics. You are restricted to one menu screen that provides numbers for different lectures instead of pictorial or verbal descriptions. This confuses you whether what the numbers are referring to.

In addition, when you are in a particular section, you will find no label that indicates which section you are already in. One more serious error that I see is that you will not find a method to bookmark the point where you are in, so each moment you desire to go back where you were, you will need to restart and try to navigate the menu system in order to discover where you have been. It is just disappointing that this system is very time consuming to navigate otherwise it is a very nice program.

Moreover the program is full of bugs. Every lesson has at least 6 bugs where it tells you that what you have typed is wrong although it is correct. This is something that is REALLY annoying and time consuming.

I enjoyed the drills that drive you to remember the matters that are being instructed and this is the thing that interests me the most about this package. It is as if you are in a true classroom. When you reviewed the lesson, you will be amazed of the amount of information which you have sustained. This package along with other Spanish CDs I have really assisted me in understanding the language.

Previously, I visited Mexico and was totally blown by how much I could understand. I would really suggest that you buy this product. However, I cannot award 5 stars for this since it is somewhat expensive.

I will talk about the good sides first. The technique is really conversational and does not appear to be extremely repetitive. Possibly you will be able to understand matters very rapidly. The associations and explanations create vocabulary building to be pretty simple. This is very opposite to the immersion method of Rosetta Stone. For instance, check out their online demo and you will be shown with images of 4 different individuals and you will have to link them with the 4 words given. But, if you have zero familiarity with Spanish and have no clue what the differences are, then you might get lost. A person who is attempting to study a language for the start would possibly feel the same way.

Another positive part of the conversation topics is that it appears to be natural and applicable. This is different with Pimsleur series, where most of the conversations appear to be extremely constricted and somewhat useless. I am neither a book editor nor an engineer and spending as much as an hour in language learning does not seem to be an excellent use of time, when I could spend that time for other more useful matters.

This review is of Fluenz f2 which is a revised version that corrects some problems in the first release. Fluenz now offers five levels of Spanish instruction which may be purchased separately or together as Spanish 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. There are 30 sessions in each level.

I think Sonia also does an excellent job of breaking down each dialogue and explaining the key concepts. I find the exercises where I type what I hear and repeating the pronunciation to be very useful.

Fluenz accepts the unaccented characters as equivalent to the accented ones so you can focus on the words and not on characters that are hard to type. There is a challenge mode you can enable which requires you to enter accents, but unless you switch your keyboard to a Spanish mode and can touch type in Spanish, you may wish to avoid that.

Fluenz also has podcasts available for Spanish 1 and 2 which are useful for pronunciation. However, I find the podcasts to be relatively lightweight given that there is more discussion than practice. Rosetta Stone does not offer these.

If you are considering some of the other popular foreign language learning programs you will probably want to read what I think about Duolingo and the ever popular Rosetta Stone before you decide which one is right for you.

Sonia Gill and her friends at Fluenz must have had great language-learning experiences at Cornell University. So, naturally, the Fluenz team developed a language learning program that attempts to simulate tutoring, and perhaps it also attempts to simulate a university language classroom.

Fluenz works by mixing on-screen video of a foreign language teacher explaining what you are supposed to learn with animated foreign-language words and simple phrase-matching and fill-in-the-blank computer games.

Their teachers are all beautiful people like the lovely Sonia Gill, and the explanations are clear and useful. If you go through the exercises enough times, you will slowly start to remember what you have seen, heard, and said.

If you work with a tutor seven days a week for at least two hours each day (four to six hours would be better), you will gradually learn your new language. I have friends who have learned languages that way, and if you do it at least five days a week (seven is better), it will work.

I do have one small gripe about their marketing claims. They claim that their Portuguese program will let you understand and be understood in Brazil, Portugal, and the African countries where Portuguese is spoken. This is probably only true for reading and writing Portuguese.

To understand how much you can learn and how much you will remember in 30 minutes with simulated tutoring, try the free Fluenz demo for 30 minutes, then try the free demo at Language101.com for 30 minutes. See which one of them helps you remember more Spanish the next day.

For example, say that you have an hour to devote to studying a Spanish verb. You could listen to a nice teacher explain all the rules of this verb, or you could simply spend your hour memorizing all the variations and forget the rules.

For the explanations of the teacher to do any good long term, you need to be able to remember them long term. One-time explanations by a wonderful, compassionate tutor like Sonia Gill are not much more likely to be remembered than one-time explanations of a new foreign-language phrase by the same tutor.

Say that you are a native speaker of English and you need to take a university class in Spanish (and get an A) because you want to go to medical school or graduate school. Fluenz would make an excellent summertime pre-study tool to prepare you to take a Spanish class in the fall.

Remember that a lot of bilingual native speakers of Spanish will be taking beginning Spanish just to get an easy A, so your competition will be native speakers of Spanish. In this case, I would highly recommend buying Fluenz Spanish and going through all the levels before your class starts.

People who only want to speak and understand their new language should buy Language101.com by itself. People who want to speak and understand a new language and also learn to write it and spell it should buy Language101.com first, and then after they can speak and understand some, learn to read and write with Fluenz.

I wrote this review because I am a wild enthusiast for language learning, and the people at Fluenz clearly are too. While the Language101.com program is a lot faster than Fluenz for most learners, Fluenz offers different languages and different features than we currently do.

As a founder of a different language learning program, people ask me what I think about the other programs they have heard of because I know a LOT more about language learning and specifically language learning software than most people.

With such a wide range of German learning programs, it can be difficult to decide to which is the right one for you. In this review I will be looking at one of the newest and most popular entrants to the German language market, Fluenz German.

Fluenz German differs from many other courses, in that it places less emphasis on immersion learning and more on structured lessons and constant drilling. As a user of Fluenz German, you are guided through each of the exercises by Nora Naatz, your personal video tutor. This more structured approach has proven popular with many customers of the product.

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