Customer Reviews

123 Speed Spanish/4 One Hour Audiocassette Tapes/Complete Listening Guide and Tape Script (Cassettes) (Spanish Edition)

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I've had Language Dynamics' Speed Spanish for just over two weeks now and here's what I can now do. I am able for the first time to speak and understand so much practical Spanish that I find it necessary to explain my experience to you in detail. Understand that I am not a linguist. I have gone to college and I consider myself reasonably intelligent but until now, learning a language has always been a scary and not too fruitful experience for me. Speed Spanish has changed all of that for me, thank God. I bought Speed Spanish AFTER trying and returning Barron's Mastering Spanish, National Textbook's Teach Yourself Spanish, Living Language Spanish, and Great American Audio/Fast Track Spanish. None of these had the exceptional METHOD that I experienced with Language Dynamics Speed Spanish. The Speed Spanish tapes and Listening Guide & Tapescript were 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 Speed 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 courss to be sterile and difficult to impossible to learn from. I found Speed Spanish to be excellent and unique in the following ways. It was easy to go away from the tapes after each session speaking and understanding a great deal more Spanish than before the session. The structure and method used in the course were so simple that the learning speed dramatically increased for me. Sentence building, practical vocabulary, and even grammar were taught as natural part of the lessons so I hardly noticed as I learned it. Most importantly, I am really enjoying learning from this course. The interview teaching style found on these tapes is quite pleasant, low key, and very effective! It is therefore my recommendation to you that you try Speed 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 Speed Spanish has gotten for me in just 2 weeks.

I am a former US diplomat and current international business consultant. I can say that Language Dynamics courses are the only courses I know of that are truly dedicated to effective and immediate communication in the target language. Academic courses often reflect the literary interests of professors, many of whom never had the experience of learning the target language as a second language. With these courses, you can hit the streets after every lesson knowing you can say more than you could yesterday.

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However, my ambivalence towards these tapes goes deeper. I
expected something called "Speed Spanish" to be direct and
fast paced, but the first 30 minutes of this tape wander almost
aimlessly through the alphabet, days of the week, months, and tedious
side explanations. The teacher rambles on in English at times, fills
up too much space with admonitions to "stop the tape and practice
if we need to" ... and repeatedly counts up the number of
sentences we can make by putting different nouns and verbs
together. (Yes, we rather expected that...)

The second tape has an
odd section into which a long repetion of the alphabet is spliced for
no apparent reason (except, perhaps, manufacturing error). It later
launches into a review of the text (though the teacher says he expects
most people to be listening in the car) in which the English speaker
reads a WHOLE conversation, followed by the translated conversation in
Spanish, rather than going back and forth bit by bit.

Other pieces
of strangeness include sections where the English teacher says a word
twice, then the Spanish speaker says a word twice. Why would we need
to hear the English word twice?

Finally, the tapes are manufactured
so that the content runs out on the first side of each casette before
the tape ends, meaning the tapes do not autoreverse properly. You have
to either reverse the tape manually or fumble for the start of the
second side with fast forward buttons.

This is the second Spanish
tape I've tried (the other was from the library), and I'd say it is
about equal to the first....

After listening minimally to the four tapes in 123 Speed Spanish for five days it is my strong opinion that all taped language courses should be like this one. It is easy to learn from and all the English definitions are given on the tapes. The native speaker speaks slowly enough for me to get the accent right. The content is exteremely useful, which allowed me to form simple sentences within minutes of receiving my course. Believe me, this course is fast and user friendly. Try it and see for yourself.

I've been working in Mexico for a year now and these tapes are helping me put this puzzle togather.I know many words in spanish but now with the help of these tapes I can now put them into sentances very easily.Thanks

I couldn't be happier with this basic introduction to Spanish. A great commuter language course.