To preface this post, I feel it’s necessary I state that we are not sponsored by The Great Courses (or Audible, as they’ll be mentioned) for this post, or any previous posts. Though, I will say, if either one wanted to sponsor us with, say, a free month or something of their services… We wouldn’t object!
For a while now, Kendra and I have been listening to Audible. It’s an easy way to reconnect with books we enjoy when we don’t have time to listen. Some of the performances are even better than we pictured the characters sounding like!
But this isn’t a post about Audible. (Perhaps I should do one, though… Hm…) No, this is a post about what we found through Audible: The Great Courses library.
We started our journey on The Great Courses with a book about language. Specifically, The Story of Human Language as instructed by John McWhorter and presented by The Great Courses.
It was amazing! There was so much to learn, and it created a budding love of linguistics in Kendra. (She would go back to college for linguistics if she could afford it right now.) The courses was taught in a fun, enjoyable, and yet enlightening way. Instead of chapters, the “book” was broken up into lectures. There was also a PDF included that went over material from the lecture, so one could follow along with the information. The PDF isn’t a transcript, and Professor McWhorter adds so much character to the words on the page that you really have to listen to him as well.
We have since listened to courses on the history of secret societies, mythologies of the world, history courses such as one about powerful women of ancient/medieval times and a more general medival history course, more linguistics courses, a course on law school made for everyone, and medical history courses such as a course on the black plague. I’m sure there’s more that I’ve forgotten, since we’ve been listening to and/or watching a lot of these courses.
Yes, I said watching. After a few courses, we just had to find how we could watch these, as the video forms were referenced in several of the courses. It turns out, instead of just buying dvds of the lectures, The Great Courses offers them to purchase individually, digitally, to watch on any device you own… Or you can do a subscription plan and have access to their entire library!
As the library itself will say on the Audible version, in my own words, just imagine how much you’ll learn if you just listen to a little at a time. We listen to the whole course in one go, knowing we can go back and re-listen at any time, and the breadth of knowledge we’ve each gained from this has been… Astounding!
There are courses on science, tech, law, medicine, health in general, stocks and crypto currencies, several languages, history… And there’s more being added all the time! To list all the kinds of courses they have would be to practically list the catalog itself, and is far beyond the scope of this review.
Being basically just the rational side of Kendra, I can’t purchase a sub myself, but what she watches, I am right there for. And let me tell you, we are both in love with the product. There are things Kendra does or watches that I’m just like, “Why am I here for this? This is a kid’s show, why am I being forced to watch this?” or “… I can’t even play this game, why must I be present? You can do rational without me in your head, right? Why must you torture me?”
The Great Courses is not one of those instances. Like, at all. The audio itself, which you can watch/download on the app as just the audio by the way, is amazing. But then you add in the extra tidbits of info you get from actually watching the videos, and you learn even more!
At this point, the only reason we still purchase the Audible versions of some of these courses is so we know we’ll have them in the future, should we have to temporarily suspend our subscription. Already, I see courses Kendra could watch with her niece as she gets older, should the kid show an interest in certain subjects.
If you want to learn something new, I highly recommend seeing if it’s available from The Great Courses- Even if it’s not, check back later! New courses are being added regularly!
And seriously- Guys at The Great Courses, if you’re reading this somehow… Keep up the amazing work. It’s efforts like this, to get more education to more people for less, that might make the world a better place in the future.
Thanks for reading, and go check out The Great Courses! If you’re not sure about it and you like to listen to audio books, start with one of the courses from Audible! Heck, Audible members have access to a few special, Audible Only courses such as a two parter on “Medical Mysteries” of history. In that, the lecturer goes over 10 historical medical cases (per part) of famous/historical people, and you can try to figure out both the diagnosis and who the patient is. It was a very fun listen, though I can’t go into too much detail at risk of spoiling who the patients are.
Until next time, thanks everybody!
Short and Scorch 