Customer Reviews

Learn in Your Car - Spanish, 2 Level Set: Audio Cassettes and Listening Guide (Learn in Your Car Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you want to learn to speak Spanish, but find it hard to sit down and study a book--for whatever reason--here's a brilliant way to use a time resource that almost all of us have: driving in our car. If you find it a waste of time to drive along listening to the radio, the Learn In Your Car series can use that time profitably, by letting you hear and repeat Spanish words and phrases, and by letting you practice out loud until you speak quite comfortably. Personally, I went through the two cassettes in Level One in about six months, and afterwards I found I could converse in Spanish! I also lost the "stage fright" that everyone tends to have when they begin trying to speak up in the new language. The extensive practice took care of that. All in all, I promise you can't lose if you get this series and give it an honest try. I'm speaking from experience! The 44-lesson first course is grouped into both general and tourist-oriented vocabulary. It also drills in sentence structure, verb forms and, of course, pronunciation and accent. The voices heard on the tape are those of native speakers who are free of regional accents, so your Spanish will be understood everywhere. Only one new word is introduced at a time, so with short lessons and the opportunity to rewind at any time, you can learn at your own pace--and you will! I am a North American who is married to a South American and I could converse with people who speak no English at all after I completed this course. Give it time and don't move to Cassette Two until you are fluent with Cassette One. You'll find this is what you've been looking for. Use radio-listening time in your car to broaden your horizons and open your mind to the second-most-used language in the United States, and our rich Hispanic heritage.

The cassettes focus almost entirely on learning vocabulary, and do a very good job of it.

There is much less attention put on conversation. The user basically needs to figure that out for themselves. For example, you can learn how to say boat, but not water until much later. Words are learned by subject matter (i.e., transportation nouns) but not used in an actual context (i.e., at the beach) So you will learn to say boat, but not to say you would like to go sailing.

Of course, this is only a first step to learn a language and taken in that context, it is an excellent one which will help build a foundation for further learning.

Very easy to follow, clear pronunciations with backup in text. Gradual increase from words to sentences to a conversational level of speaking.

The sound quality of the tapes made them too hard to understand; as if it were taped over many times. There were too many voices in the background making it impossible to follow any one in particular.

This product will not teach you to speak spanish. The tapes are merely a vocabulary list read aloud. A female narrator says the english word and male narrator gives the spanish translation.
After about 10 minutes into the first tape, I knew I had been had. The positive reviews of this product must be from employees to the publisher because I just can't see how anyone could give a four of five star review to this product. I recommend that you save yourself time, money and frustration by finding another Spanish learning tool.

I have tried six learn-on-your-own Spanish tape programs over the past -- yikes! -- 20 years. When friends ask for advice, I always tell them to start with Learn In Your Car. Indeed, I looked up this product today because I plan to send it to a friend. We have both Spanish and French, Level One. I bought the Spanish one years ago and still sometimes pop it in the cassette player of my older car when I need to brush up.