Is anyone out there familiar with Vera Birkenbihl, or with her "Birkenbihl-Approach to Language Learning"?
I'd be curious to know what people think, especially successful learners like Steve K, Tom, Easterner, et al.--her method seems similar in some ways to thelinguist.com and Antimoon.
You can take a look at:
http://www.birkenbihl-insider.de/birkenbihl/PDF/MethodEnglish.pdf
I ran through the file, and at first reading I liked the idea of word-by-word translation being provided, as a means of emphasizing content. Based on my experience, it is a common difficulty for many language learners (especially if they are learning their first foreign language) to fail to learn to master the "usage patterns" of the target language (they tend to enforce the patterns of their own language instead, even at supposedly more advanced levels). Once this "breakthrough" has been made, it is much easier to follow it up with any listening, reading or production exercises you find appropriate.
I actually think that some languages can only be taught by using at least some elements of this method - I have a Mandarin coursebook which provides a phonetic transcription as well as a word-by-word translation along with the Hanzi text. This helps me a lot to get an idea of the "usage patterns" behind Mandarin, which differs from that of European languages in significant ways. I admit I did find some structures funny - such as the "both-ways" questions, like: "Are-you-coming-not-coming?" -but this only got me more involved emotionally. You should also have appropriate listening material at hand to master the four-tone pronunciation, so the Birkenbihl method seems to be the most apropriate method for learning languages which differ from the speaker's own language conbsiderably (like an English- or Spanish-speaking person learning Chinese, Korean or Japanese, for example).
On the whole, I think this is a rather transparent method, but its effectivity also depends on how involving the content is. At this point it is useful to pair it up with the self-teaching method of Kató Lomb, which has been discussed in another thread:
http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t533.htm