Customer Reviews

Instant Immersion Spanish Advanced

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

 

 

I used this just to buff up on my Spanish after spending the summer in Brazil learning Portuguese to get my head back into Spanish before going to study in Spain. It was fine for that, but don't think you can learn Spanish from this. If you are just going on vacation or something, it might be useful to help you learn a few phrases, but not much else. Language learning is not something with many short cuts. Basically, you need to sit down, learn the grammar, watch movies, talk to native speakers and preferably go to the country or a country where the language is spoken. This can be a useful tool, if you use it in the right context, but alone, it's almost useless. Also, a word of warning - this is European Spanish, which was useful to me, but might not be what you want if you will be traveling in the Americas. It's not quite as bad as the Portuguese cd, since continental Portuguese is more or less a different language than Brazilian, but this may no be the product for you if you don't want to learn the Spanish of Spain.

I have an undergraduate degree in Spanish and consider my Spanish level to be advanced intermediate. It is difficult to find Spanish tools that are fun and engaging that are not catered to a Spanish beginner. This tool is great for that group of people who have had at least one year of college Spanish, have learned basic verb congugations and are looking for a CD-Rom that will teach them more vocabulary words, idiomatic expressions, and words that aren't covered in general Spanish classes (for example animal sounds- woof, woof is guau, guau). It is important to note that Obelix is a comic from Spain so the idiomatic expressions and some vocabulary is more commonly used in Spain and less in Central or South America. This CD-Rom follows the comic cartoon of Obelix and his adventures. Each page shows one frame of the comic, you hear the words spoken in Spanish, and you have the option to view the words in Spanish or English, and a "professor" gives the translation of idiomatic expressions and explains some harder to understand words. This system is great because after learning some words you can replay the CD-Rom without English translations or even viewing the Spanish translation and see if you can understand what is occurring just by hearing the comics. The comic format also makes learning new vocabulary much more fun and enjoyable than memorizing lists of words. You can replay the audio of the comic as many times as you like. Once you have a firm foundation of the history you can play games that reinforce your learning such as multiple choice questions that require you to understand the options by only hearing them. I am giving Asterix 4 stars instead of 5 because I would liked more direction on which idiomatic expressions and vocabulary words are used only in Spain and which are also used in Central and South America.

I bought this as an advanced level to try and maintain my Spanish and possibly improve it. To do the activities, you have to spend your time trying to remember which one is Asterix, which one is Obelisk, or whatever, and the non-spanish and non-english names of all the other characters. This is more frustrating than it sounds, when it asks you "de que color fue la camisa de Asterix?" I bought this to learn Spanish, not to play memory games about what color they colored in Asterix's shirt two cartoon panes ago. In other words, the ability to progress isn't based on Spanish knowledge, but trivia of the Asterix cartoon, which isn't even funny or entertaining. Not worth the money.

Note To Previous Reviewer: As the title says, this is "Instant Immersion Spanish **ADVANCED**", not Basic or Beginning. If you are looking to learn Spanish, don't buy a product inappropriate for your level and complain about it being over your head.

I bought this program thinking that it would help me get a basic understanding of vocabulary and putting together sentneces. The first cd is "ok", just gives you a lot of vocab. I went on to cd 2 and it instantly started throwing out full questions in spanish with words I have never heard before. Not sure how this program expected me to be able to answer the questions with them never teaching the filler words?! I tried all the cd's looking for the one that taught me the sentence structures, verb conjugations, etc. Not there! Worst thing I have ever bought and got very frustrated with it. Definitley a return item!!!