Description:
Budding diplomats and world travelers can get a good start on the polyglot life with Foreign Language Advantage 2001. Six tutorials cover French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, each using slightly different lesson plans and levels of depth to keep things interesting. Whether you're playing games to help grasp Parisian pronunciation or learning to order a meal in Rio by watching a native do it, it's easy to forget you're a student. The graphics vary from unassuming word lists to well-rendered 3-D animations and video clips; watching the speakers' lips move can help you pick up languages much better than working by ear alone. Since the materials are so widely spread, you won't master any of the six languages but should pick up enough to ease a first-year class or get by on a trip abroad. The document translator will quickly and easily help you shift between English and the five included European languages (sorry, no Japanese) in e-mail, Web browsing, or other documents. Another utility, the five-language talking dictionary (including Dutch but not Portuguese or Japanese), is less flashy but more powerful for working on pronunciation of unfamiliar words. Finally, the Vocabulary Builder program helps you retain words in 12 languages through proven mnemonics and other neat tricks. The world's getting smaller and smaller, but we're still stuck with the consequences of the Tower of Babel. Foreign Language Advantage 2001 is the key to the global village. --Rob Lightner
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