Spanish FSI Basic Course Platiquemos Basic Course Level 1 (8 CD's and Book) (Spanish Edition) [Audio CD]

Don Casteel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1582141827 | ISBN-13: 978-1582141824 | Publication Date: March 1, 2002 | Edition: Pap/Com

The world's best Spanish course just got better! Don Casteel, fluent in several languages and a former Foreign Service Officer, is well trained in the FSI method, and has completely revised and improved "the course that works." This 2002 Edition has improved audio with both male and female voices and over 200 illustrations with factoids, and the content is more contemporary than ever. This new version has retained the same grammatical and language content that has made this the most widely sold course on the language market. This basic Spanish Course is designed for people who need to learn a language completely and quickly. It is a five level course that once completed will enable you to understand spoken and written Spanish. It will also allow you to actively engage in conversations with an abundant vocabulary of several thousand words. Level One of the Platiquemos FSI Basic Spanish Course contains 8 CDs and one book

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Biography of the editor of Platiquemos, Don Casteel

Don Casteel spent over twenty years in the Foreign Service of the United States, retiring with the rank of Consul General. Raised in a totally monolingual environment in Wyoming, Don achieved during his career full professional proficiency in five languages, including Spanish, as tested by the State Department’s Foreign Service institute. He spent much of his career in Latin America, and is a graduate of the Foreign Service Institute in Finnish and German (as well as Spanish). He also served as Deputy Director of Professional Development at the Foreign Service Institute. His experience in Latin America includes tours of duty at the American Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as at the American Consulates in Monterrey, Mexico and Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he held the office of Consul General. He also served as Director of Counter-terrorism programs for the whole U.S. Government, with responsibility for all of Latin America. Don has tried to bring both his language learning experience and his experience with the Latin culture to both Platiquemos’s students and those who use reference works (such as Ensenemos). Among his innovations are using authentic historic illustrations to give a cultural and historical flavor to Platiquemos’s works. He considers his work with Platiquemos as a continuation of a lifetime of public service.

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Multilingual Books; Pap/Com edition (March 1, 2002)
• Language: Spanish
• ISBN-10: 1582141827
• ISBN-13: 978-1582141824
• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 10.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,158,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

126 of 128 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good, complete course for learning Spanish, February 3, 2004

By 

D. Allen "gt4715b" (Columbia, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spanish FSI Basic Course Platiquemos Basic Course Level 1 (8 CD's and Book) (Spanish Edition) (Audio CD)

I am writing this review to help anyone who is looking at making a sizable investment(in time and money) in a complete course in Spanish. First, a little about my experience. I have been studying Spanish for a long time, but have only really been studying hard for the past year. I am a self assessed Intermediate Mid on the ACTFL scale, so I really can't comment on the effectiveness of this program if you are a true beginner, although my sense of it is that it is better to have at least some experience before starting.

Now, about Platiquemos. The Foreign Service Institute courses are widely acknowledged as the best complete courses for learning a foreign language. Platiquemos is based on the FSI Spanish course, updated to modern times. The strength of this course is that it covers the entire range of grammatical structures necessary to effectively communicate in the language. I'm really excited about moving through and finishing the complete program. I have completed the Pimsleur Spanish course in its entirety and while it is a very good course in its own right, its coverage of advanced grammar is lacking. I think the best one can achieve with the Pimsleur program is an Intermediate Low, although I would recommend it as a beginners program if you have the money. The other great advantage about this program is that one can learn at his or her own pace, although I would recommend that one practice at least something every day. My current pace is one unit per week(there are 55 units total in 8 levels), doing the lesson once daily M-F and twice daily on the weekends for a total of about 6 hours per unit, which is about what Platiquemos recommends.

Now that I'm finishing up Level One, I think I can comment on some of the what the other reviewers have said. First, one reviewer has noted that the speech on the tapes is considerably slower than "normal" speech. While this is true I think(download some sample tapes from their website and compare it to a novela on Univision), I don't think this has a substantial impact on one's capability to learn. The reason for this is that most of the exercises are sentence length utterances, which minimizes any difference in speech rate.

The same reviewer also notes that the prompts for the variation drills are in English instead of Spanish, which takes a little away from the effectiveness of the drill. I would have to agree with this assessment, but I don't think it's a deal breaker.

Another reviewer stated that there is not enough time between exercises to complete the exercise. I can state that this is definitely not true. For each exercise, I have enough time to respond twice, once before the answer is given and once after the answer is given and before the next exercise begins. The reviewer himself states that he has enough time to think about the correct response, but not enough to speak it. But this is the point of the Platiquemos (and any other) program. The responses have to be automatic and instinctive. If you find yourself thinking about it too much, you need to practice some more.

Another reviewer noted that the tape quality isn't optimum. The tapes do have a cut and paste quality to them. In addition, there are occasional discreptancies between the tape and the book, although there were only maybe about 10 in the entire level.

So in summary, if you are really serious about learning Spanish, this is the course for you. It will be well worth your investment(hint: check out the Platiquemos website).

212 of 222 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Too fast or too slow - a judgment call, April 11, 2003

By 

Donald Casteel "Don Casteel - Author of 'Plat... (Panamá) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spanish FSI Basic Course Platiquemos Basic Course Level 1 (8 CD's and Book) (Spanish Edition) (Audio CD)

I am the author of Platiquemos, and I am grateful to Amazon for the opportunity to clarify the technical issues raised by "Happypup". I have given 5 stars only because stars are required--not because I presume to rate my own product.

The primary issue raised by Happypup is the speed of speech on the audio. The decision to moderate the speed was not taken lightly; numerous native Spanish speakers with decades of experience teaching Spanish to English speakers I consulted were unanimous in their opinion that the audio in the original 1957 Foreign Service Institute program (of which Barron's Mastering Spanish is a copy) was unnaturally rapid, and not at all representative of the way Spanish is normally spoken. The audio is not only for comprehension, but also represents models for emulation; trying to mimic the rapid speech of the original by a student could result in serious pronunciation errors which would be very difficult to correct. Correct pronunciation learned at a moderately slow speed can be speeded up; garbled speech resulting from trying to speak to fast is a serious impediment to communication. This was apparently recognized by the authors of the original FSI program--the speech in the second half of the original is markedly slower than in the first half.

Happypup's comparison of the lengths of the "Conversation Stimulus" exercise in Unit 3 is only partially because of slower speech in Platiquemos. Most of the difference is because Platiquemos contains the "Narrative" portion on the audio which was omitted in the original and the Barron's copy. This was done in order to facilitate using the audio in a modern environment, i.e. without having to constantly refer to the text. This was also the reason for including English cues in the "Variation Drills". Unfortunately, there is no other way to make these drills flow smoothly without reference to the text--they are, in fact, a specialized kind of translation drills.

Finally, the use of speakers with "Mexican accents". The Platiquemos audio has 18 voices (the original has 6), 11 of which are Mexicans (the original had no identifiable Mexican voices, 4 of the 6 sound like Caribbean dialect speakers). Not only are about a third of all native speakers of Spanish Mexicans, but the speech of educated Mexicans comes very close to typifying a standard Latin American Spanish. Platiquemos does contain voices from all of the major accent regions of Spanish (Spain, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone of South America).

54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Platiquemos is a complete course for speaking Spanish, April 28, 2005

By 

luke - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spanish FSI Basic Course Platiquemos Basic Course Level 1 (8 CD's and Book) (Spanish Edition) (Audio CD)

I've tried a several courses and books for learning Spanish. Some promise the easy way. As far as I can tell, there is no easy way. It takes a lot of time and discipline to really learn a foreign language. I'm talking about knowing the language well enough to understand movies, TV, and converse with native speakers. Platiquemos is one of the few courses that can take you from the beginning to the end - fluency. It is an 8 level course.

I bought the download edition from the platiquemos-letstalk website. It has over 47 hours of audio, and 1400 pages of text. You cannot finish the course in 47 hours though. It's really a 600 hour course. You'll need to listen to each lesson several times, and that is a good thing. Some course like Pimsleur offer 50 hours of audio, but you only have to listen to lesson once or twice because they're so easy. In the end, they have about 100 hours of instruction. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute created the course Platiquemos is based upon. They train diplomats and other people to be able to communicate professionally in language languages. They have found it takes about 600 hours to learn Spanish if you have effective materials. They actually created a course to teach people with no previous experience in Spanish to communicate well. This is that course, updated with modern typesetting.

Although you'll be glad you have all the text in the course, 90% of the time, you can study away from the written materials. That's great if you commute. The course will teach you how to read though, so you won't be illiterate when your done. You'll be able to speak, read, and understand Spanish.