Review by PT Cruiser

If you want a good introduction to the Spanish language, I think this program would be helpful to you. It would also be a good companion product if you were taking a Spanish class or using a more comprehensive Spanish course product. Since I don’t speak Spanish, I think I’m a good test subject. Here’s what I liked and didn’t like about this course:nnI received the product as a Vine Voices item to review, but if I were to buy it, the price is reasonable for the amount of material you receive. There are 9 disc included, with lessons, in levels 1, 2 and 3, an Oscar Lake game, one disc that includes phrases in everyday language, and to perfect your pronunciation. There’s also a disc that you can transfer to an MP3 player and carry with you. I didn’t like that it’s necessary to insert the discs in your computer in order to use the program, other than the one MP3 disc that I just mentioned. So if you’re traveling, it’s extra materials to carry around. It would have been nice to be able to just load them on a laptop. With a netbook, most which come without CD drives, this would have been even more of a problem.

There were a lot of lessons with phrases and some with sentences, but it was difficult without much knowledge of the language to figure out what some of the individual words meant. Many times I was guessing. It was nice to have all the photos and video of people talking, or at least of their mouths moving. I liked that they used both male and female voices and that they repeated phrases and sentences twice in most cases. I’ve learned numbers and some phrases, but I would have a difficult time putting together a sentence on the basis of what I’ve learned with this course. Different verb tenses which are important to learning a language weren’t covered in a meaningful way. The MP3/iPod audio disc was useful, as far as it went, carried some information on verb tenses, but just not enough that I had enough understanding beyond the phrases covered.

I’m not sure how this program compares to Rosetta Stone because it’s been at least 12 years since I’ve tried Rosetta Stone and in a different language than this and I’m sure there have been many changes in the program over the years.

If you need a companion course to a class you’re taking or to a more comprehensive course I think this would be an great way to supplement that. Or if you just want a nice introduction to Spanish, to see if it’s a language that you’d enjoy learning this product would also be excellent and the price is very reasonable. But to actually learn to converse with Spanish speakers, I think you need something more.