TRAVEL: Expensive Language Lessons? Doesn't Translate

Farah Nosh for The New York Times ChinesePod has language lessons for your iPod.

April 6, 2010, 11:00 pm

By MATT GROSS

At the beginning of this year, I made a resolution to learn to speak Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, two of the most commonly used languages on the planet and the keys to travel over a great swath of the world.

For a couple of weeks, I thought it might actually happen — I was going to San Francisco, after all, and staying in the heavily Latino Mission District. But since my traveling companion was my 1-year-old daughter, Sasha, conversation was generally pretty limited, and though I sang her nursery rhymes in Chinese, I can’t say my language abilities improved at all.

From there on, things have gone downhill. Next I went to Italy, where I had to dredge up all the Italian I’d forgotten in the year since I’d last been there, and as I write this I’m traveling through Austria, Slovakia and Hungary — countries where I hardly speak a single word of the local languages. For the first couple of days in Vienna, I answered everything with “Si” — yes in Italian. But by the time I started walking across the Slovak countryside, I found myself wishing everyone would speak German.

Sure, I have a phrasebook or two, not to mention access to Google Translate — which I’ve used in hotels to plan out phrases I might need later — but what I really need is a dedicated course of study, whether online or in person, to bring my tongue up to speed. Oh, and it has to be frugal, of course.

Unfortunately, learning a new language takes time and, usually, money. Classes, textbooks, tutoring — these add up quickly, and over the months it can take to achieve proficiency, you’ll spend even more. But there are a few ways to learn a language that can save you both time and money.

The most seemingly modern way to learn a language is through one of the CD- or software-based language courses, like Pimsleur, which was recommended by many of my readers, and probably the most famous, Rosetta Stone. They’re not necessarily frugal, but they are popular, so here’s a look at what they do.

The hook for Pimsleur’s CD-based audio courses in more than 40 languages is the so-called Pimsleur Method — the discovery that, according to Pimsleur.com:

“if his students were reminded of new words and information at gradually increasing intervals within a set amount of time, each time they would remember the word or information longer than the time before. Dr. Pimsleur documented that the word would actually move from short-term into long-term, or permanent, memory.”

In other words, while other methods also teach new foreign vocabulary, Pimsleur supposedly helps you remember it better.

I can’t say if this method is more effective than any other, but the prices seem fair enough. An introductory Hungarian course with 10 lessons costs a reasonable $24.95. Shorter courses in other languages can be $11.95, while comprehensive courses are a stretch at $345.

But why pay at all? There are hundreds of free language-lesson podcasts floating around the Internet. There are dozens on iTunes alone: Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Thai and so on. Of particular note is SurvivalPhrases, which offers 3- to 5-minute episodes that cover basics  like “Where is the bathroom?” in 19 languages, including Vietnamese, Russian, Greek and Brazilian Portuguese.

Of course, SurvivalPhrases’ free iTunes downloads, which offer 15 phrases, are there partly to hook you into paying $25 for 45 more at SurvivalPhrases.com.

Another podcast, the nearly five-year-old ChinesePod, has another, more innovative selling point. While many of its 1,300 podcasts are free, access to all of them costs $14 a month, and $249 gets you three months of access to all of them, plus a virtual classroom where you and three other students have — via Skype — weekly hourlong lessons with a Chinese teacher.

That price doesn’t sound too bad, since you’re interacting with someone who can listen to and correct your pronunciation, an aspect missing from most of the other online or audio-based language courses. Praxis Language, ChinesePod’s parent, offers similar courses in Spanish, French, Italian and English.

The close cousins of the language-lesson podcast are the iPhone-based phrasebooks and dictionaries. From Lonely Planet’s Mandarin ($9.99) to the 99-cent Klingon phrasebook, not to mention a ton of free versions, they help you through the basics of a new language, with sections on things like counting (yi, er, san  —1, 2, 3 in Mandarin) and food (“nuqDaq yuch Dapol?” is how a Klingon asks where you keep the chocolate). Often, they have audio components to aid you in pronunciation, and some of the Chinese dictionaries let you practice writing characters.

I’ve been traveling with a couple of these on my iPhone for a while, and frankly, I don’t use them all that often. It’s so much easier to whip out a real, printed phrasebook and flip through it for the words I need. Right now I’m carrying Lonely Planet’s German phrasebook and also its Czech one. (I wanted a proper Slovak one,  but Lonely Planet doesn’t produce one and I couldn’t find another at either my local Barnes & Noble or the independent book store.)

Why Lonely Planet when I could also have chosen Rough Guides or Berlitz? No particular reason. Most of them are pretty similar — they’re all covering the same details —and the prices are uniform, too.

Third graders in Ridgewood, N.J., learn Spanish using Rosetta Stone.  Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Ideally, though, you’ll do your language study before you hit the road. And the biggest name in language learning these days is Rosetta Stone, which combines a unique educational philosophy (it purports to immerse you in a foreign tongue as if you were a child) with high-tech software. That is, its packages come equipped with a microphone headset that lets the program evaluate your pronunciation. Of course, this isn’t cheap. An elementary Spanish course is $229, while a full five-level course costs $699, so I haven’t tried it yet.

And for that amount of money, you could learn a language the old-fashioned way – by immersing yourself in a foreign county. For the price of Rosetta Stone’s five-level course, you could do two or three weeks of “super intensive” study at the Casa de Lenguas in Antigua, Guatemala, one of many schools around Latin America that arrange both language lessons and home stays with local families ($85 a week via Casa de Lenguas).

Still, frugal language travelers should pick their destinations wisely, as learning Italian in Florence, or Russian in Moscow, may not be quite so affordable. The Russian courses organized by places like Globus International and Liden & Denz run upward of 260 euros a  week, or about $345 at $1.32 to the euro, and that doesn’t even include accommodation, visa fees and the inevitably higher cost of getting to Moscow.

If you don’t want to travel, but are still seeking one-on-one language lessons, try Craigslist. A recent search on Craiglist’s New York City pages for “language exchange” pulled up a Taiwanese music student looking to trade Mandarin for Italian lessons, and a guy in Chelsea named Tino who wants to improve his heavy accent in exchange for Spanish lessons.

Just the other week, in fact, I found a woman — she teaches Chinese at CUNY, actually — who wants to exchange Mandarin instruction for help with her written English. Since I think I may know a thing or two about writing, I got  back to  her, and while we’re still working out the details, I have high hopes that I can fulfill my New Year’s resolution without spending a cent. Wish me luck — or, as they say in Chinese, 金榜提名!

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