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Innovative Language Learning…
Before I started downloading iPhone Thai language apps to review, I hadn’t heard of Innovative Language Learning. Their frequent inroads into the Thai language learning market interested me enough to take a look.
Innovative Language Learning sites provide podcasts with accompanying text expansion exercises and other extensive tutoring aids available to paid subscribers or “premium subscribers”. While Innovative Language Learning, LLC is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, the lessons are recorded at various locations throughout the world.
And while they didn’t have a Thai iPhone phrase book app on the market when I wrote iPhone apps: Thai Language Phrase books late last year, they do now: SurvivalPhrases – Thai.
In my recent review, Learn Thai on Your iPhone: Thai Alphabet and Vocabulary, you can read about their other Thai apps: MyWords Thai, WordPower Thai (one of my top favourites), and Gengo Flashcards Thai (another favourite of mine).
Poking around their site, I see they have two more products for the Thai learning market, Survival Phrases Thai, and ThaiPod101.com.
Free lessons at Survival Phrases Thai…
There are two versions of Survival Phrases Thai. One is the iPhone app mentioned above, and the other is their online version with mp3 and pdf downloads. From what I can tell, the sound files are exactly the same.
Each lesson is about 4-6 minutes long. They start with an explanation of the Thai words and phrases, and then run you through your Thai paces at the end of each lesson.
The lessons are geared towards tourists coming to Thailand, but they are a decent introduction to the Thai language for those living in Thailand as well.
SurvivalPhrases.com is designed to provide world travelers with essential phrases in multiple languages and cultural insight you will not find in a textbook.
The 50+ phrases selected for this series are the most useful travel phrases as determined by a frequency of use analysis. In addition, the topics and cultural insight are also the result of careful research on up-to-date topics.
The full version of Survival Phrases Thai has 60 lessons at a knockdown price of US$25. So if my tally is correct, they work out to around 40 cents per lesson.
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Are you into FREE? Then check their course out beforehand, gratis. To do that, get the first ten lessons free either on their website, or by signing up via iTunes: Thai Survival Phrases. If you do download their mp3′s at iTunes, be sure to go to their site to get the free pdf’s written for each lesson.
The free lessons cover: Thank you, you’re welcome, please, basic greetings, parting greetings, where’s the bathroom, can you speak English, I don’t understand, say it again please, apologies, business greetings, non smoking / smoking, at the table, table etiquette, and getting the check.
Coming soon: ThaiPod101.com…
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If you need more than 60 Thai phrases, Innovative Languages has another product in the wings: ThaiPod101.com. It’s a fair bit more expensive (as it would be) but other than that I can’t enlighten you on the contents personally (not unless they give me a free membership… hint… hint..).
The best I can do at this point is share a fairly comprehensive review by Kai Pan, who dug into one of their other language courses to give us the ChineseClass101.com Review.
So it looks like the future of learning languages is coming along quite nicely. You can learn via iTunes, iPhone, iPod (and all the other iProducts), study online, as well as print off lessons to study offline.
That means that you can wake up in the morning and take that jog while listening to your lessons via your iPhone or iPod, get back home and study your printouts, listen to lessons during short breaks throughout your day either on your computer or your iPod/iPhone/iThingies, and then plug in your ears before heading to bed.
Enjoy…
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