Review by J. Fuchs

It’s a great fallacy that the best way to learn a foreign language is the way that babies learn it, i.e., through total immersion.

This is because:nn1. Babies don’t have any other way to learn language; andn2. Babies’ brains are wired for language acquisition in a way adult brains aren’t.

(BTW I have a degree in Linguistics, so I’m not just making this up).

Rather than trying to teach how to use Spanish, the program just plunges you in by giving you random words and phrases by categories (countries, food, etc.). There is no attempt to distinguish between commands and statements, teach verb forms or anything else you would learn in any high school or college language course. So you might memorize a few statements, but you won’t really understand what you are doing.

Then there’s the pronunciation (and some of the grammar and word choices as well). It’s Castillian Spanish, which is only spoken in Spain. Spanish varies from country to country, but for anyone most likely to be using Spanish in the Americas, learning to speak with this pronunciation isn’t really helpful at all.

If you just want to learn a few words and phrases for a tourist trip to Spain, then maybe this program is okay. To really learn the language, you are better off paying for at least one term of actual classes and putting in the time with a decent Spanish textbook and doing the work.