Language Learning Reviews

Why 98% of Language Product Reviews Online are Meaningless

Beware of most language learning reviews on the web. 98% of them are sales pitches from affiliate marketers who earn a commission from you, should you buy from the website to whom they link you.

Therefore, most language learning product reviews on the internet are not worth the paper that they are not written on. They are worthless in terms of being actual reviews of products by someone that is genuinely qualified or capable of writing a review.

When they rank a list of language courses, you will often find that the one ranked the highest pays the most commission, so whether its product is any good is of little importance to the website owner.

When reading any product review of any language learning product you must consider the motivation of the writer, and the publication or the media vehicle.

Nowhere is this more so than on the internet and the world wide web.

The trouble with most internet language learning reviews is that 98% of them are written by people or companies that are affiliates or associates of the products that they are reviewing.

What it means is that you really have to do the research yourself or check out some forums for the views of other learners.

What is an affiliate, or an associate?

It is a company that is acting as agent for another company selling a product. One of the world's biggest affiliate companies is amazon.com, and they are responsible for laying the foundations of affiliate marketing or associate marketing. Anyone with a website can become an affiliate of amazon.com for free.

How does the affiliate get paid? The affiliate or associate writes a webpage and puts this on his/her website. The webpage is written on a product that amazon.com sells, for example a language learning product like Linguaphone or Berlitz, Michel Thomas, The Learning Company, Transparent Languages etc, etc.

When a websurfer finds the page and reads the blurb the affiliate is hoping that the websurfer clicks one of the (usually several) links from the webpage and will be taken to the amazon.com website.

Embedded in that link from the affiliate website to the amazon.com website is a little piece of code with the affiliate's account number and this tells amazon exactly which affiliate sent the surfer. The code registers in the amazon database, and if the surfer buys a product, the affiliate then gets a commission. (In the case of amazon a very little commission! Other companies are more generous).

You can often actually see the affiliate link in the coding at the bottom of your internet browser when you hover your mouse over the link text.

This affiliate marketing or associate marketing is a multibillion dollar industry now in terms of sales and companies like amazon have tens of thousands of affiliates and associates.

There are literally thousands of companies that have affiliate schemes where webmasters sell the wares of the merchant through these little links

The language learning reviews that you read therefore with their gushing praise of one product is usually designed to getting you to click to the site to make a sale. Most of the webmasters will not have seen the product let alone used it!

The Lesson regarding Language Learning Reviews... Do Your Research

The lesson from all this is that if you are looking for language learning reviews of substance, of actual credibility your chances of finding them anywhere on the internet are slim, and you need to do a great deal of your own research to come up with the right answers.

The next problem is that very, very few people have the time to really review all the courses (good and not so good) out there in the marketplace. So the really skilled language teachers that are out there and that are qualified to compare one course with another really do not get to view more than a small handful of courses!

Check out my reviews of various language learning products, and do remember that I am manufacturing and selling my own language learning products for Spanish, French, German, Italian and Welsh, so my own language learning reviews of Spanish , for example, will reflect my own biases.

However, I can tell you that as a person who enjoys learning words, expressions and phrases in different languages, and who is constantly assessing various language learning products for ideas and methodology I can always provide you some insights of value.

Some Pointers about Language Learning Reviews

Overall I can make some comments for you to take away about the language learning products out there.

Never before has there been so much good product for language learners available.
Many of the top brands are of good quality.
To learn a language properly requires a huge amount of dedicated input - about 700+ hours to become professionally competent according to the Foreign Service Institute assessment system.
You can pick up words and phrases quickly, and these are all that are needed to get started and to have the locals appreciate you making an effort.
To get to the basic level of conversation needs about 60-100 hours of study.
You will advance by having regular conversations with a good teacher - and this should be at least two hours per week. To be serious about learning a language you should allow 6 to 10 hours a week.
At some stage you should consolidate with a period of language immersion.
You can create your own immersion situation.
Probably 90% of language learners never get beyond the ability to carry out more than a very small conversation in the foreign language they learn, despite sometimes years of study.

A key lesson to learn from this is that the student that wants to learn can use one, or more, of many available techniques and courses, and will succeed with quite a high degree of hard work.

If you are going to achieve fluency you will need to put in several hundred hours of study, and should spend at least 6 to 12 months in a total immersion situation.

Using accelerated techniques will greatly improve this process, but still many hundreds of hours of study are needed to get a solid grounding in a language, and putting the material that you learn in to conversation.

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