Bruce_in_LA

Wonderful

Revisado: 12-21-22

Peter Ustinov was a wonderful speaker how many interviews with him can be found on YouTube, more than a few in German. This audiobook of about two hours is a collection of quite a few different speeches or radio interviews. I’m delighted we have it available. I could understand it almost perfectly with two or three years of college German.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Too little material stretched into four hours

Revisado: 09-09-18

I have studied a number of languages and I understand repetition. I also have enjoyed OTHER Mark Frobose courses (introductions/reviews of French and Italian). This was my first Mark Frobose disappointment. Each of four one hour lessons takes a short vignette of about 8-10 sentences (Donde' estan' las blusas? Tiene que subir al cuarto piso.) and replay them FOR AN HOUR. Let me qualify: This course would be just fine if you listened to the first 15-20 minutes of each hour class. It would be terrific if they used the four hours to have at three twenty-minute repetition conversations per hour. With one single, one minute vignette drilled for one hour, after twenty minutes you want to throw the speakers out the fourth-story window they are going up to 60 times.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Definitely good as a review.

Revisado: 05-21-18

This is a couple hour review of key and core phrases in Italian, with very little grammar although they do walk you through what each word in a phrase means. Definitely this is first class for me: a review of basic Italian as I get ready for a trip. I've known a few thousand words of Spanish my whole adult life, and I've studied amateur French and Italian on and off. This is "30 lessons" but obviously each lesson is just 2 or 3 minutes long. Typical: "Vorrei fare una prenotazione per questa sera" I would like to make a reservation for this evening [at a restaurant.] If you don't know the first word word of Italian (or Spanish) my guess would be all these dozens of rapid fire phrases for two hours would be hard to really absorb and lock down. In that case (coming from a cold start) I always recommend Pimsleur, which is kind of slow and premium priced but the first 30 lessons of Pimsleur (=15 hours) ruthlessly and repetitively hammer about 10 words per half hour into your head like it or not. But back to the product under review: as a review audio course if you have basic kind of initial familiarity I can endorse this Survival Phrases course. Note there are two "volumes" each about 2.5 hrs.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Very good - like a radio documentary

Revisado: 11-22-17

Imagine a Ken Burns tv documentary converted to Radio format and that's about what this is. Many voices, historical audio, narration by Martin Sheen, and interviews with today's elders who remember the 1940s. (One recurring voice is actor Norman Lloyd, who was born in 1914! and had a 75 year marriage. By the way, Lloyd is from New Jersey but has a perfect 1930s era Trans-Atlantic diction and accent.)

It was a very good experience to hear this audiobook and I was sorry when it was over. It really brought the 1940s to life again.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Wanted to like it, too much seemed repetitive

Revisado: 08-31-15

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

The topic is important - everyone needs to communicate better and star communicators get a lot of respect regardless of their specific industry or position. However, for me too much of this book was a grab-bag of factoids (e.g. anecdotes about IBM Watson playing Jeopardy) or long explanations of the familiar ((e.g. we get too many emails a day). Sometimes I felt like the book was talking about the same thing 20 minutes later - meaning it would be easier to have a book to skip ahead in, rather than an audiobook. When the book arrived at new material - talking about internal communications software that's better than email at several companies - that also seemed to go on for a long time. Company X has a proprietary internal information Wiki system called Y. I had thought messaging would be more practical. Here's six key things you can do for clearer messaging. Here's what five top business communicators have learned about messaging. Here's three things to do when you're concerned the audience is distracted.

What about Jonathan Yen’s performance did you like?

The narrator was very good.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

very interesting

Revisado: 04-07-08

while you got alot of detail you might not ask for about events in the months of 1959/60, the caliber and range of debates was very interesting. really happy I heard this.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Shrill and not too informative

Revisado: 10-23-07

I found this to be low on meaningful content, a rather shrill or florid writing style, and I was very disappointed because the theme had sounded very interesting.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 3 personas