Customer Reviews

Behind the Wheel Spanish/Complete Illustrated Text/Answer Keys/8 One Hour

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

My hearty congratulations to Language Dynamics for having produced what I consider to be the industry standard in professional, high quality Spanish instruction without the hassle. Both the American instructor (sounds like a friendly college professor) and the Spanish speaker are both excellent and really teach you Spanish.
I personally prefer Behind the Wheel Spanish 8 CD with text over Pimsleur Spanish and Learn in Your Car Spanish, both of which I have tried and since returned.
Behind the Wheel Spanish is better than Pimsleur because you have multiple tracks and don't have to keep your finger on the fast forward button to get to where you want to go.
If you fast forward with Pimsleur, you miss the graduated interval recall benefit which is programmed into the course. Too rigid for me.
Learn in Your Car doesn't provide you with the sentence building techniques that makes Behind the Wheel Spanish so effective. I was actually 'communicating' with my own sentences after just a little over 35 minutes with this course. Amazing.
Behind the Wheel Spanish is by far the best Spanish course I have tried because it gives you abundant and reusable templates that you form on your own to create your own specific communication. This is far better than the competition.
Both Learn in Your Car and Pimsleur give repetitions at the same native speed. Language Dynamics gives you the first Spanish repetition a little slower so you can understand and imitate the pronunciation more effectively. They then gives you a second Spanish repetiition at native speed. Much better.
Lt's not forget that Behind the Wheel Spanish is the only one on the market that includes
rea-life idiomatic of folk expressions like 'I stuck my foot in my mouth' and 'I got up on the wrong sde of the bed'. I mean, NOBODY has this stuff but Language Dynamics.
Last and certainly not least, Behind the Wheel Spanish comes with a 200 page book with drawings and English right under the Spanish. The answers are right there too so it's a no brainer.
My results speak for themselves. This course really works.

I had a little Spanish in college and a few visits to Spanish-speaking countries. I needed a major brush-up before a two-week trip to Latin America. This CD set was ideal. It covers a lot of ground, sometimes rather quickly,but refreshed my memory for vocabulary, verb structure, the nuances of pronouns and some idioms. The sound on the CD set is excellent and the Spanish speaker has superb diction. I've been listening to it in the car, my only free time to do that, and that works very well. Just rewind to go over something again or hit pause when traffic distracts you. Very satisfied overall.

I'm going to weigh in on the debate over which is better, Learn in Your car or Behind the Wheel?
For my money, Behind the Wheel is the best.
I too purchased both courses. My experiences are as follows:
1. Behind the Wheel is much more 'friendly'. It is more effective because it actually teaches you how to communicate, not just memorize phrases. You actually 'speak your mind' with Behind the Wheel.
2. I had plenty of time to repeat. To me, the response times are perfect. What's more, they always review everything so thoroughly that it is impossible to miss anything.
3. Lots of explanation, practice, vocabulary with Behind the Wheel. Great method.
In a word, I am not the Spanish review guy. I am a gringo learning Spanish. While effective to a point, Learn in Your Car lacks the memory technique, sentence building technique, great native speaker voice, explanations, and so forth that make Behind the Wheel Spanish my all-time favorite.

This is a pretty good course. I've learned some Spanish and I am just on CD 2. But, the book does not match the cd's very well. Some of the words taught on the tape are not the same words (are they synonyms?) in the book. I think it was originally just a book and tapes, not meant really for learning behind the wheel and they just copied the tapes to CD (see Conversational Spanish in Nothing Flat).
There are 2 tracks on each cd, each about 30 min long (the front and back of each tape) and if you want to repeat a section of audio ('repetition is the key to learning' the instructor tells us), you have to >> or << the cd player - not the easiest or safest thing to do while driving. And if you are not careful, you are back at the beginning of a track. Not much fun when you are 15 minutes into a 30 minute track and the only way to get back is to hold down the >> key...

If they had taken just a little time and divided each tape into about twenty 3 minute tracks so that the driver could review more easily, it would be so much better.

Two thumbs up for Mark Frobose of Language Dynamics for having designed the fastest and easiest way to speak Spanish on the planet. And where of all places? In your car, `behind the wheel'.
I have been buying and analysing quite a few different Spanish courses on the market. I come to this as a novice, a beginner and with each and every course I try and return, I learn something new.
Here are my impressions of the competition and why I consider `Behind the Wheel Spanish 8CD and Text to be the best in the West.
First, in order, let's begin with the `least in the east':
1. Berlitz. The worst. No English. Bells, chimes, dogs barking,.... They'll do anything to keep from using English to help you understand and learn Spanish. What is this idea that people have that'guessing' while driving is a good thing.
Behind the Wheel Advantage: Clear English given for every word, every sentence, FIRST and then you get the advantage of hearing this great Spanish speaker with superb diction teach you how to say these things in Spanish. Beautiful.
2. Living Language. Next to worst for the car. Once again, you hear someone babble off something in Spanish and are left clueless as to what they said. As you stop at a light or speed onto the freeway, your anxiety is increased and you haven't learned a thing. You have to wait until you get home, work your rear-end off to find in the book what should have been on the CD.
Behind the Wheel Advantage: Once again, these guys did all that work in advance, and it's all on the CD. The explanations are in English, given by an American instructor with no accent. Then the Spanish guy (Luis), comes on with this professional voice, clear, easy-to-understand, and first slowly and then a little faster, tells you how to speak real Spanish.
3. Pimsleur: A little better (but not much). These guys give you English and Spanish, and then repeat just a few words and phrases over and over and over. Very limited vocabulary. The problem is that there are no tracks for easy switching back and forth from one track to another. Why? Because they have a method that requires you endure the entire half hour so your foreign language memory will improve. What a crock. What if I only have 5 minutes?
Behind the Wheel Advantage: Multi-tracks for easy switching, tons of vocabulary, packed with new words, phrases, etc .... Big plus is that they teach you how to form your own sentences from the first CD on. That's right. You learn to speak like a real person and not a parrot.
4. Drive Time: This course really cracked me up and nearly got me into an accident. They actually use car horns (of all things) to announce a new lesson. When you hear that horn blast, the first thing you'll do is turn around and see who is honking at you. Sress bomb.
5. Learn in Your Car: This is the next to the best course that I have tried. These guys don't use a horn, they have what I think must be a large Chinese gong or an electric blasting machine that produces a super loud cymbal sound between lessons. Still, the course is good. The problem is that you just repeat canned stuff and never learn how the language is put together.
Behind the Wheel Advantage: You learn how to construct your own sentences from the first CD, you learn tons of vocabulary to add to your sentences, you learn the past, present, future, etc ... plus..
you learn idioms like `She stood me up'. Outstanding. No horns or anything strange. Just an enjoyable learning experience.
Well folks, there you have it. These are my reasons for preferring Behind the Wheel Spanish.
Whatever your choice may be, happy motoring.

I stumbled upon Behind the Wheel courses quite by accident.
I was in a Barnes and Noble store and overheard someone talking about Behind the Wheel courses in Spanish and French and inquiring about availability. Fortunately, the title was mentioned and I remembered it.
This piqued my curiosity and I went home, checked it out on Amazon, bought it and have used it every day for the past six weeks.
I report my results:
1. I now speak Spanish. I spoke none before, never studied the language in school and have no real formal experience learning foreign languages (just a taped course here and there). In fact, they used to scare me. How well I now speak is a matter of interpetation. How well I am now able to communicate is easily documentable. When I deal with Spanish speakers in a Mexican store or at work, they understand me, I usually understand them pretty well if they speak slowly. We talk. That's the bottom line.
2. I have friends who have studied Spanish for years in school and/or have tried different Spanish courses that can't speak Spanish half as well as I can. Sure. They know a lot of grammar and things I know nothing about, but when it comes to speaking the language, I win.
3. These same friends have listened to my Behind the Wheel CDs and they always say the same thing. 'Great voices' and 'I wish I had started with this course first'. I guess this is because the course sounds so easy.
Like I said, I'm not a language expert so I can't tell you that this is best course on the market or not. I'm probably not even qualified to tell you its defects. What I can tell you is that thanks to this course and method I can now speak Spanish. Based on that one fact I would recommend it to you.
I did the same thing with their French courses and got similar results. What I like more about Behind the Wheel Spanish is that it comes with a great book which has helped me considerably in learning the language.

*Note - I just changed this review and upped the rating from 4 to 5 stars.

This eight-CD set has a brilliant start. After listening to the first four CDs, I felt very accomplished - the author takes you through key phrases and words in a logical manner. Be forewarned, the last four CDs get difficult very quickly! You will have to deal with irregular verbs in the present, past, and future tenses.

The accompanying book is quite useful for written exercises. Despite the typos and unprofessional presentation (old typewriter fonts, uneven spacing, old-style illustrations), I find the exercises challenging - the CDs are a lot easier to get through compared to the book.

Overall, I recommend this book/CD set to people who are totally new to Spanish. I came in with high school and college French, which helped a little.

One strange thing about the CD set is the length of each track. Apparently they just ripped the audio from the tape versions, which were 30 minutes for each side. Thus, you get 30-minute tracks! You better have a CD player that remembers where you left off.

I received Behind the Wheel Spanish as a Christmas gift and finally got around to using it last week.
I was surprised at how much Spanish I learned from my first session.
I really didn't expect to walk away in a half hour speaking a few sentences in Spanish but that's what happened.
I tested out what I learned on my wife's Mexican hairdresser that same day and she understood me.
I told her in Spanish that I like to eat and that I like to sleep. (In that order).
Not bad for a half hour.
Another thing I noticed from my brief first session is that I wasn't bored with the material.
It was actually sort of fun to work with the American instructor and the native Spanish guy on the CDs.
My only question is this.
If I came away from my first session speaking this much Spanish, how well will I be speaking the language if I use this course every day for a couple of months?
The answer to that question is 'Mucho'.

AFTER trying and returning Pimsleur, Berlitz, Barron's Mastering Spanish, National Textbook's Teach Yourself Spanish, Living Language Spanish, and Great American Audio/Fast Track Spanish, I finally got smart and purchased Behind the Wheel Spanish. None of these other courses had the exceptional METHOD that I experienced with Behind the Wheel Spanish. I found Behind the Wheel Spanish to be versatile, relevant, had a very appealing and useful content, appropriate course speed, and was very relevant to my learning needs (which was to speak Spanish as quickly as possible). Several of the other courses I listed were either horribly fast paced, used esoteric Castilian instead of the more common Latin American Spanish used in Behind the Wheel Spanish, and were all just a rehash of the old 'mope and grope' stale language learning techniques your old high school teacher used to use. I found these courses to be sterile and difficult to impossible to learn from. I found Behind the Wheel Spanish to be excellent and unique in the following ways:
1. It is easy to go away from the CDs after each session speaking and understanding a great deal more Spanish than before the session. The structure and method used in the course are so simple that the learning speed dramatically increased for me.
2. Sentence building, practical vocabulary, and even grammar are taught as natural part of the lessons so I hardly noticed as I learned it.
3. The book is GREAT. Complete translations on the same page with all the answers.
Plus the tapescript. Nice.
4. Most importantly, I am really ENJOYING learning from this course. The interview teaching style found on these CDs is quite pleasant, low key, and very effective!
It is therefore my recommendation to you that you try Behind the Wheel Spanish if you are interested in a one stop, multi-purpose, versatile, relevant, easy, very fast, and extremely 'user friendly Spanish course. If you are a linguist, enjoy guessing, want to learn only Castilian Spanish and aren't interested in immediate results then you might try another course and still be satisfied. It is my humble opinion that there is no Spanish course on the market that can even approach the results Behind the Wheel Spanish has gotten for me in just a few weeks.

I am a happy user of 5 Behind the Wheel courses. Every one I have used has shared the same outstanding features which,when compared to other leaders in the industry, makes these the best at getting fast results in speaking a foreign language easily.
My reasons for thinking so are as follows:
1. Excellent production. Great voices which are easy to listen to. Multi-track. User friendly. Generally very well made.
2. Terrific method. Leaves the competition like Berlitz and Living Language in the dust.
Fast. Teaches sentence formation within the first 15 minutes of CD 1. I mean, NOBODY has this stuff.
3. Enjoyable. You get the feeling that you're in a conversation with some nice people and not learning a foreign language. This really helps to lower your anxiety and gets you speaking the language right away.
4. Great customer service. If you lose a CD they replace it free and fast. I had two replaced. One for Chinese and the other, Italian.
5. No translation or grammar. Just like they say in their ads. They teach you how to speak a foreign language the way you learned English. Naturally.
A definite must-buy even if you already have a foreign language course. This approach
also compliments many others.