With summer approaching it's a good time of year to be thinking about a holiday or two, and if you're jetting off to foreign climes why not take the opportunity to get your hands dirty with another language?

Last year we looked at the Fluenz foreign language learning course and were impressed by its well-integrated components and structured approach. If you're not happy shelling out upwards of £200 for a full course, though, Berlitz has arrived with a cheap and cheerful alternative.

Distributed in the UK by Avanquest Software, the series includes French, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese/Japanese, with each package adopting a similar approach to learning.

The bulk of the suite comes in the form of an installable application, with PC, Macintosh and Palm and Pocket PC versions supplied. There's plenty of help available to guide you through the software and a video introduction will explain the various units, but in practice the five areas can be visited individually depending on what area of learning you're looking to practice.

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A series of dialogues or ‘immersion environments' can be selected to kick-start proceedings, at which point a video of actors conversing in a foreign tongue will get things started. Underneath the video display is a transcription of the conversation along with a translation for each line, with the general idea being to try to understand the gist of what's going on.

More specific study of various parts of the conversation is then available in the ‘reading' section, where you can focus on individual words or phrases by reading a translation, find out more about the word and its usage or add key phrases to a ‘checklist' for later reference. It's also possible to make notes about key words to help remember them better, and the software comes with a handy screensaver for Windows users that requires you to ‘fill in the blanks' for selected sentences.

A series of activities is available that includes crosswords, word dictation, a sentence scrambler, vocabulary test and verb recognition, all of which are designed to test knowledge of the words used so far. Pronunciation can be checked by recording speech to fill in the gaps in sentences and perfect your accent, and it's also possible to adopt the role of one of the actors in the video clips by speaking their lines.

In addition to this interactive software, other material includes an MP3 CD full of key-words and phrases that can be copied onto an iPod or other MP3 player, featuring a particular word, translation and a video image, split into useful categories for practising on the move.

Finally, a series of four audio CDs is provided to listen to when you have a spare moment, these adopting a more traditional approach of walking you through various conversations and explaining their meaning. These tend to dive right in at a beginner-to-intermediate level, relying on repetition and memory recall as the method of teaching.

We referred to the Fluenz language learning solution earlier and if you've read our take on that software, you will know that we were extremely impressed by its particular approach to learning.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Berlitz, as while there's an impressive amount of content provided at a reasonable price, it'll take a lot more self-motivation and determination to pick up the skills you'll need. The way the software presents dialogue and relies on user interaction to pause, repeat and practice phrases means that you'll still have to develop an individual approach that suits you best, and the general flow of each unit and range of tools on offer can make the package as a whole seem a little untidy.

Berlitz succeeds in offering a wide range of content and some useful learning tools in the choice of audio CDs, interactive software and an audio ‘phrasebook' for portable players. There's plenty here to be getting on with and it certainly represents value for money, even though the information isn't presented in a particularly friendly way. It would be more suited to those who are keen to improve on basic knowledge rather than learn from scratch, however, and either way you'll need to be quite self-motivated to get enough from it.