Unfortunate false advertising by foreign language companies.

It is unfortunate that companies engaged in the selling of foreign language courses often provide false information to their customers. One company stated that the Chinese government after a world wide search selected its foreign language courses to be the curriculum for the entire country of China. The report was fabricated. This same company said that its foreign language courses were used by the Peace Corps. Also an untruth. Another foreign language company introduced a picture system that was copied from The Learnables®. The program itself is difficult to use and difficult to understand. This same company advertised that their course of instruction was “used” by the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army had a contract with this company for only a few years to enable members of the U.S. army families to have access to its language programs. The course was never used by the U.S. Army in its instructional program. The U.S. Army procedures are very different from this company’s computer system course. After broadly advertising that the company’s course was used by the U.S. Army, it never reported that the contract was cancelled after a few years. This same company has a chat page. When asked on the chat page, how much Japanese can be learned in three levels, the false response was that after taking three levels of the Japanese course a person will be fluent in speaking, reading and writing. Another company says you will be speaking in three weeks. They don’t define speaking, but it may mean that you can say a few memorized sentences. Another company uses a computer speech processing system to teach the pronunciation of foreign words. Pronunciation is learned as you understand the meaning of the words of a language. The production of sounds cannot be learned in isolated words with the company’s poorly designed speech sound computer program. Another company hired an Olympic swimming star to advertise that he was speaking Chinese from their course. This company never showed the Olympic star speaking Chinese, all they said was he was learning to speak Chinese. Finally a company used the term “conversational language” to advertise their speaking courses. Over 90% of the sentences that the students heard in the courses were other students struggling to make sentences. However, the term “conversational language” was an attractive advertising incentive. The Learnables’® educational staff is appalled by the false promises and statements that major foreign language companies often employ.