Languages Center

This is the only thing that you’ll need to learn German quickly and efficiently. I had a brief layover in Germany, about nine hours, but I didn’t want to spend those hours confused or disoriented from my lack of fluency in the native language. I searched for quite a bit of time for a solution to my language deficiency, but nothing was really ‘working’ for me- until I saw this product. I highly recommend it to anyone who has a problem similar to mine or to anyone who simply wants to learn a new language! I absolutely love the voice recording feature which allows you to finely ‘tune’ your pronunciation. I remember taking French in school, and this product is just like having a real teacher to guide and instruct you! Forget about books and other programs that offer maybe half of what this has to offer. If you aren’t the ‘school’ type, and think that perhaps this program won’t be able to hold your attention, think otherwise! There are many interactive games and even lessons you can simply transfer to your iPod (or other mp3 player) and listen while you go about your day. This worked for me and if you’re looking to learn German (or perhaps another language that Instant Immersion offers), search no further!

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It is difficult to believe how amateurish this software is. No, “amateur” is not the word. I’ve used dozens of excellent Linux applications from the free software community, almost all written by amateurs. There “amateur” tends to mean solid, with few or no bugs, simply lacking some of the slickness of professional products (and not even always that). That does not describe this product.

No, this was probably written by true professionals, with too little time on their hands. No amateur working on this at night out of love would come up with this jumble of junk.

Instant Immersion is better described as juvenile, disorganized, and creaky. I’m sure the interfaces would have been truly cutting-edge…in 1987. It’s worth knowing that it consists of six to ten separate, weakly linked products in one box. I imagine they were all written by one company, but they have slightly different feels and interfaces. (Yes, it turns out there are multiple ways to feel ugly and disorganized.) So you should read the subtitle “Levels 1, 2, and 3″ as “Programs that were written by programmer 1, 2, and 3 in our shop. We let #3 use bigger words.” (And hey, in Deutsch, the words can get really big!)

With all this in mind, you’ll understand why I was relieved, rather than upset, to discover that some kind of bug rendered this program basically unusable on my MacBook (OS 10.5). With (literally) every single word that I attempted to learn in the “Talk Now Part I” program, a dialog box would appear to explain that a long unsigned integer was expected but not found. (I wasn’t informed what was found instead. Hmm?) I sympathize, I really do. When I want an unsigned long integer and get, I don’t know, a cheeseburger, it’s really distressing. So this dialog box wants to know if I’d prefer to “Cancel” or “Quit”. “Quit” is obvious enough–you give the program permission to crash. “Cancel”, it turns out, means “ignore the cheeseburger and treat it as an unsigned long integer”, or something. But click the wrong box, and your work learning German is done. It’s like it was never tested. I’d assume this bug does not apply in Windows, nor in the previous (yellow) edition. But maybe I am being too generous.

Aside from the insufferable long integer dialog boxes, there are plenty of weaknesses that could be overlooked individually, but not in combination. For me the most severe was the requirement that you run the application from the CD-ROMs. I understand they want to protect their intellectual property (such as it is), but the performance hit you take from reading EVERY SINGLE NEW WORD off the CD is enormous. The program is just looking up a short audio file, a small and ugly image, and some letters. From memory, that would be a piece of cake. From the disk? Many seconds. Add on the way that the detective game “Where is some missing dude?” can only run in full-screen mode but using only a small subscreen (320×200 maybe? Or 480×300?); the way that the MP3 files are a zillion little one-word files (free of any context or even the English translations; the way that the program does not appear to engage you in conversation at any point…. Well, I think I’ve covered enough serious flaws.

It’s true that I did not give the program much of a chance to show me some unexpected tight connections between the sections. I can’t say whether it teaches grammar as well as vocabulary. Perhaps the advanced levels (which also have debugging dialog boxes) engage you in conversations.

You see, the program being so weak in all respects, I was glad to have a technical excuse to send it back for a refund. (I assume it’s hard for the vendor to argue with “It pops up a pointless debugging dialog on Mac OS X for every single activity I attempt”.)

Perhaps language-learning software is just an impossible dream. The pain of using the Instant Immersion program is far too great, and the expense of its most prominent yellow-boxed competitor (you know who I mean) is just far too steep. I am going to return to my previous German-learning technique: checking out the excellent Pimsleur language CDs from the local library, maybe buy some textbooks or workbooks.

I don’t know what to say about all the positive reviews that the 2nd (yellow) edition of Instant Immersion receives. Are they using the same program I got? Did the 3rd (orange) version break everything that was beautiful in its predecessor? Or have we all come to expect sludge in a box when we buy software? I did not think I was a total software snob, but perhaps that’s the answer. Anyway, if you are, too, then I thought you’d like to know why I found this program not worth the polycarbonate it was printed on.

But if you find something good, let us all know!

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