I have now finished listening to this course. It contains
ten lessons that each last half an hour.
The advantages: it is a good drill with lots of repetition
and after faithfully doing all the exercises you can't help learning the material.
You have talked to yourself quite a bit which should help becoming fluent in
the language or at least getting an understandable pronunciation.
The
disadvantages: the range of the covered material is very limited and the course seems strangely
incomplete. The lessons cover only about a hundred words or so, and that's including words like Gandhi.
After completing the course you are going to
be able to ask someone for a lunch date and argue with him or her endlessly about
whether you should eat at the hotel or drink tea at the restaurant and whether you
want to go to your place or his or her home. However, you will not be able to
ask your date their name, or say please, and thank you. The course won't help you say you need a doctor
or the police. You will be able to say you're
American or Indian but if you're from anywhere else you're out of luck. You won't be able to buy a train ticket to Delhi in Hindi or ask what anything costs. You will
be taught some future tense verb forms but only in the masculine. You will learn
how to ask what time is it but if the answer is six, seven, ten, eleven or twelve o'clock
you won't be able to understand the answer because those numbers were never covered
and they never got around to times that deviate from the full hour either. All
in all it seems just like a snippet of a longer course and perhaps it is. But since
it's for sale as a package¸i would like it to feel more planned and complete as
a whole.
