Social Media:  

The Linguist features social networking features such as blogs or forums, although when we actually accessed the forum all we saw were students who were complaining that they were having trouble with The Linguist system. The company does, however, make all of their lessons downloadable to iPods. And they do offer a newsletter.

Quality of Instruction:  

The Linguist has some very nice lessons, however, what really brings down the quality of the service is that so many things are translated. This may be good for a beginning student, but as you get better at English, you want to read the instructions in English so that you will build up your understanding level.

Variety of Offerings:  

We were really wowed by the very interesting cultural lessons in The Linguist library. They had lessons on these fascinating topics: Falun Gong, Mass Defections Threaten Somalia’s…, and novels such as “A Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs. You can really learn English by reading their lessons on topics that pique your interest.

Instructional Options:  

We really liked the option for students to be able to write papers and have them corrected. Certainly many language teaching approaches overlook this very important aspect of writing.

You may be thinking that writing isn’t as important as speaking, but remember this important point: If you are unable to write something, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to say it. Focus on your writing and you’ll see how your speaking ability will improve.

The Linguist definitely has some good qualities. The topics of their lessons will be of interest to most every English language learner. They have the beginnings of a decent social media component to their site, but it has not been developed to where it’s of interest to their students. We were also turned off to the use of the native language for directions. It might be better if they offered this option only for beginning students and not for advanced.

Their approach to teaching Business English is unique and we applaud them for that. We hope in the future that The Linguist grows into a real quality English teaching website. In the meantime, we suggest that you visit our reviews of English4today, English, baby! and Livemocha, our award winners for quality English instruction online.