This week we launched our groundbreaking Platinum series, and here at the Living Language offices, we’re unbelievably proud to finally show off all the hard work we’ve been doing over the past year or so.
Everyone carries their computers or other gadgets around with them these days, accessing the news, their music, their photographs, and their games. We’re no different: we’ve caught each other playing the latest grumpy avian app after hours, or syncing devices to listen to podcasts on the way home. Why should language courses not exist on the same plane? The Platinum courses are the result of what we saw as a necessary next step in the type of language learning we provide. You should really be able to learn anywhere, on your own terms. Not just in front of a computer, but when you’re on the go, waiting in line at the post office, exercising at the gym, sitting in the park on your lunch break. And it shouldn’t cost an entire paycheck to build a really strong foundation in a language. So we decided to come up with something we’d never done before: the total package, a new approach to learning languages that uses the best of what Living Language has always been good at. We just applied it to the modern portable world.
Another great innovation in Platinum is live instruction. We knew the value of personal tutors, so we hired a wonderful army of native language teachers to teach small groups and offer their advice and expertise to our learners, as well as give people a chance to practice their new language with a real person. We also know that building a community is a valuable asset to learners of any subject. My favorite way to brush up on and expand my language skills is by reading forums with advice on grammar and movie or music recommendations (when I was studying Russian, I “wasted” hours watching Kino videos online, only to discover I was learning their lyrics by heart), while Chris has been known to make his own flashcards for multiple languages to flip through while riding the subway. Others in our group swore by the reinforcement you get from successfully completing quizzes. So we included it all: tutors, forums, games, and digital flashcards complete with images and audio.
We aimed to represent these different styles as best we could, and it’s all come together in such a fluid, organic way, that we really believe it’s the next best thing to living in France or Italy, Germany or Argentina.
We know you all have these different styles too. We hope that you’ll appreciate the result of our brainstorming, collaboration, and research. We’ve worked hard to provide you the tools, and now we hope that you’ll start to live the language yourself, in your way and on your terms. After all, the accent is on you.
-Suzanne, Editor
