Customer Reviews

Ultimate Spanish: Basic-Intermediate on CD (LL(R) Ultimate Basic-Intermed)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I had two years of Spanish in college and four years later bought the "Ultimate Spanish: Basic-Intermediate" program to brush up on my skills. This has proven a good refresher course, but those new to the Spanish language should not purchase this for use as a "self-teach" program and expect to develop strong skills.

Many of the explanations in this book are quite brief, and the written drills are very limited. Anyone using this as a refresher course would do well to also purchase "Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses" and "Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions," both by Dorothy Richmond, for more extensive written exercises.

I used this self-study course for 4 hours per day for 3 months, in conjunction with VIS-Ed vocabulary cards. It prepared me well for a trip to South America. The course offers pronunciation for both Spain and Latin America. The cultural notes are basic and useful. The dialogs are mostly relevant for a traveler.

The major drawback is the Learn-on-the-go CDs. There is no transcription provided; I was unable to follow these CDs. If there had been a transcription which I could have reviewed at home, the CDs would have been much more useful. Since this is the first edition, there are numerous typos and errors in the text, which could have been corrected with more careful proofreading. I would advise you to wait for the next edition.

GREAT REFRESHER COURSE for former Spanish students.

I studied Spanish for 9 years and was practically fluent. 14 years later I find myself struggling to remember basic vocabulary, verb conjugations and familiar phrases. With my experience in the language, I've been able to successfully complete the first 5 lessons in only a few sessions, with excellent retention. My email friends from Spain and Peru have already noticed an improvement in my Spanish.

The CD's: "Learn at Home" are helpful if you need help with pronunciation. I enjoy learning from the "Learn on the Go" CD set because I am forced to recall the information without the aid of a textbook. I feel the pace of the conversation is good, and the CD format makes selecting a lesson easy.

Why only 4 stars? Another reviewer made flashcards....I made an Excel spreadsheet. It would have been great to have all the vocabulary and phrases on a ready-to-use CD or disk. Here's how: One column for the English words/phrases, one column for the Spanish translation, and a third column for the exam. Simply hide the Spanish column and type your answers into the exam column. Unhide the Spanish column to check you answers. Mark wrong answers with red text.

Format:The lessons are divided into functional topics like time, greetings, weather, health, food, phone calls...making it easy to learn and reference information. I find this format much more enjoyable than the traditional classroom & textbook method.

14 months ago I came home from my second trip to Costa Rica anddecided to teach myself Spanish. I purchased Ultimate Spanish andbegan my journey. I completed the final lesson 4-5 months ago, and have been reviewing the material repeatedly since. I certainly can't claim any fluency (am not able to follow Spanish TV or radio), but I have spent two weeks in Spain and three weeks in Mexico travelling alone. My Spanish was *incredibly* helpful! I am now able to carry on broken, inefficient, but ultimately satisfying conversations with patient natives! I am convinced that if I can become competent at the grammar and usage covered in these 40 lessons, I will be very functional in Spanish.

The good and the bad on the course:

Having a lot of audio material (8 CDs) has proven very valuable. At first it was dificult for me to listen to the audio, and I found myself studying the written text more. As I progressed through the lessons, the audio material became more and more important, and the grammar and vocab work seemed to take less and less time. Now I find reviewing the audio is sufficient for me to continue to progress.

The CDs fall into two categories: 4 'Learn at Home' discs (to be studied with book in hand), and 4 'Learn on the Go' (with lessons designed to not need a book). There is a corresponding 'On the Go' lesson for each 'At Home' lesson.

Each lesson took me about an hour and a half to complete, including listening to the audio for the first time, doing my first night 'memorization' of the lesson's vocab, reading the gramatical information, and completing the written exercises. Reviewing the vocab was an ongoing process.

There were two things I feel the course needs: 1) Better vocabulary review materials (printed flash cards and a vocab CD), and 2) more audio dedicated to interactive drills. I would have been willing to pay good money for these tools. Instead, I ended up making them myself. The lesson CDs include a pronunciation of all the vocab, but it is spoken in Spanish only. The more difficult test for the English speaker is to hear the word in English and attempt to recall the appropriate Spanish equivalent. I made my own recordings by speaking the English, then playing the Spanish word from the CD. This became my primary vocab review tool. Hearing the English word, recalling and speaking the Spanish translation, then hearing the native speaker speak the translation correctly helped me learn more naturally than simply quizzing myself with flash cards. Why didn't Living Language make that CD for me? Maybe I'll sell mine!

Also, I wish there were more drills included in the material. I did purchase the Living Language Mastering Verbs series (a separate product from the same company) which has been very helpful, but I think more drills should have been included in the original material.

I also have to pass on a frustration I had with the Living Language company. My car was broken into, and one of my lesson discs was stolen. Living Language has no program to sell replacements--they told me I had to buy the entire course again.

In general, the instruction in the written material is well written and comprehensible. However, I have found the free online tutorial to present gramatical material better. This site has a CD course that they are also selling (substantially more $ than Living Language). I've never tried it, but I often found the free online tutorial to clear up areas of confusion that the Living Language program had left me with. I suspect it is a very good course.

Overall, thumbs up on the Living Language course. Creo que yo puedo viajar solo en el mundo español!

Since I have studied Spanish through much of my academic career, I have a pretty solid foundation. This book starts off a bit simplistic, but soon moves into more complex and more useful language skills. If you don't have any experience in Spanish, it might be a bit much to absorb at much, but for those with some working knowledge, this is a great reference book. The division into one set of cds for use with the book at home, and another set to use on the go is near perfect. It allows you to get more assistance from the text when you need it most: at the beginning. Later, when you are more familiar with the language, you can fine-tune your skills in the more immersive "On The Go" discs. The sound and recording quality is excellent. While you won't be fluent, you'll certainly be a competent Spanish speaker when you are through with this.

I took a few years of spanish in high school and a year in college. The program is so fast paced that all I had learned was covered in the first ten lessons. It is a great program but well over bearing. Be prepared to spend A LOT of time with the book and CD's. You may need to make your own flash cards since none are provided. There are a lot of words (hence, a lot of flash cards needed). I would recommend this program to those that have had the language in the past. If this is your first time learning the language you can get lost quick. The method is very fast paced and intended to absorb you completely into the language.

I have done numerous language courses, and this one has to be the most annoying. There are two sets of CDs...one to learn with the book and one to learn in the car or "on the go". Unfortunately, they are really the same thing. The "on the go" version is extrememly difficult to follow, it's poorly organized, and the same voices that want you to repeat the spanish keep saying "lesson x, section n" in spanish, then with no warning or direction start throwing actual phrases at you. It's tough to tell what you're supposed to be repeating/learning and what's just telling you what lesson you're on. I returned the program and purchased Pimsleur's Speak and Read Spanish instead. It costs a bit more, but if you order from the used section (which doesn't alway mean used), it's fairly comparable. This is the second Pimslear's course I've done and I am very happy with it.

After using Bertlitz and several other language systems in my quest to master Espanol, I discovered Ultimate Spanish. It combines visual with translation, audio and grammar in a manner that pushed my language level forward faster than any other system I have used. At last one system that gives you everything... If you have been struggling with an immersion method, the additional instruction in this system might be the key!

Fast-paced and professional, this course is geared to students with a solid intermediate Spanish background. The audio quality is excellent and the wide variety of native accents represented in the tapes was extremely helpful to me in understanding the speaking styles of different countries. The book is a gem; very well organized with a glossary and grammatical reference material in the appendix. I did have trouble with some of the "listen and repeat" excercises. Often the phrases were too long for me to grasp and recall in the short interval provided, which made the excercises a bit more challenging than they were probably intended to be.

Overall, the word I'd use for this learning program is `unfocused.' The author just kind of wings it with no particular student in mind-or perhaps he was trying to be all things to all people, I don't know. His goal seems to be to cover the vast majority of Spanish grammar in a 6 x 9, 400 page book, leaving explanations too thin for beginning students and not providing information that would be critical to someone looking for a review.

These problems are compounded by strangely lazy writing. Vocabulary lists aren't alphabetized, generally don't include an article, and often don't allude to the fact that a given word has both a masculine and feminine form. The Learn on the Go CDs don't have a transcript. The occasional `lecturas' don't have a full translation, instead providing a very incomplete list of vocabulary words that takes up more space than a translation would have. Perhaps worst of all, written exercises are nearly non-existent.

I was already pretty well versed in Spanish vocabulary and grammar before I bought Ultimate Spanish and for my purposes (improving my listening comprehension) I guess it wasn't bad. Having said that, I don't know that I wouldn't have been better off just buying a Spanish novel and the corresponding audiobook, or perhaps spending $... renting a DVD that has a Spanish soundtrack and subtitles.

The odd truth is that there isn't a lot of good Spanish learning material out there and this course just adds to the mountains of mediocre books, tapes, and software already in existence. If, however, you're bent on using this program to learn Spanish, do yourself a favor and buy Dorothy Devney's two excellent (and inexpensive) workbooks as a supplement. They cover most of the same territory, but with infinitely greater depth and clarity.