Berlitz Latin American Spanish (Berlitz Cassette Packs) (Spanish Edition) (Audio CD)

by Inc. Berlitz International (Editor) "This section is designed to make you familiar with the sounds of Spanish using our simplified phonetic transcription..." (more)
Key Phrases: por fabor, soup sopa, par favor, Mexico City, South America, Latin America (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This completely revised and updated program gives you a practical, quick, and convenient way to communicate in Latin American Spanish. Over 70 minutes of audio and our best-selling Phrase Book & Dictionary provide the conversational skills you'll need to handle a variety of situations while traveling abroad - from ordering a meal to asking for directions and finding emergency help. There are dialogues, featuring native speakers, that present over 300 essential expressions, a flexible format that allows you to listen and repeat in your car, at home, or on the go as well as a quick-reference, color-coded phrase book that includes more than 1,200 useful words and phrases, travel tips, dictionary, and pronunciation guide.

About the Author
Since 2000. Hammond, American Map, Langenscheidt Dictionaries, Insight Travel Guides, Delorme – the famous names in the Langenscheidt family. These represent the most authoritative, up-to-date, and extensive travel and reference products available. In January 2003, the renowned Berlitz Publishing became part of the Langenscheidt Group. The Langenscheidt Publishing Group, the premier group of map and travel companies, offers over 4,000 North American and international street maps, road maps, atlases, language-learning, bilingual dictionaries, and travel-related products covering countries, cities, and languages in every continent.

Product Details

• Audio CD: 224 pages
• Publisher: Berlitz Guides; 2nd Revised edition edition (August 2001)
• Language: Spanish
• ISBN-10: 2831578515
• ISBN-13: 978-2831578514
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,370,181 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not very helpful, September 11, 2003

By	"_ares_" (Alaska) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Berlitz Latin American Spanish (Berlitz Cassette Packs) (Spanish Edition) (Paperback)

This is a fairly typical traveler's spanish "course." Knowing that, one shouldn't expect to get too much out of it.

Still, with the high praise generally given to Berlitz courses, I expected something a little more... everything.

The book seems to have originally been a European Spanish course, which was superficially altered and relabeled so as to bring in more money for the authors. In a brief perusal of the phrase book, I noticed several faults. Several phrases seem to be word for word translations that won't necessarily be understood by native speakers. Other phrases, while common in Spain, are much less so in Latin America and so aren't very helpful and can actually be detrimental in your attempts to communicate.

The tape, while potentially useful, is slowed down for easy consumption. While that is nice for beginners, and gives you a wonderful ego boost when you realise that "this isn't so hard to understand after all!" it doesn't help you much when it comes to understanding native speakers, who often speak quickly and without the perfect enunciation demonstrated in the tape.

For anyone who is seriously studying Spanish, this is not the right course. It's too insubstantial to give you more than the most basic (and sometimes flawed) grasp of the language. From what I can tell, most of what is offered in this "course" can also be found, for free, at http://www.fodors.com/language/ An internet search for Spanish-English Dictionary will easily cover the rest.

For a more complete, true Latin American Spanish course I suggest Colloquial Spanish of Latin America by Roberto Rodriguez-Saona. It's a true course (but with two tapes and a book, we're not exactly talking Pimsleur here), not a phrase-book and tape course, and a thourough study of that will give you a much better grasp of the Spanish language than this will. It's dialogues are up to speed, with native speakers, and cover such handy things as exchanging telephone numbers, and verbalizing web adresses. You'll be far better off with that.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It was so bad it was almost funny... not really funny, but really bad!!!., November 30, 2005

By	K. Yorston "bumblesnirt" (Bellingham, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

OK, I know you do not get much for $13. but this was a bad course, especially since it was designed by Bertilz. 1st chapter was how to say "yes", "no", "thank you"...really simple stuff we probably all know. That was OK. I was looking for a beginning course so the beginning is a good place to start... unfortunately, the next chapter was designed by someone who was on drugs... The second chapter, "things to say in a post office"... started with the phrase "do you know who this purse belongs to?" HUH? Purse? Post Office? It got worse... we learned how to say "it is not mine" HUH? Now I have to be honest, I stopped listening because I was laughing, but not for long... after all I wanted to learn some basic Spanish. It was really no laughing matter.

This CD is long on phrases, that are to be repeated after the speaker, but short teaching the words contained in the phrase, that might be useful in future conversations. I would like to learn which words are which in phrases such as "can you please tell me if this hotel has a pool?" or "Is there a television in the room" , so I might learn to ask a more pertinent questions for my particular situation such as " Does this hotel have internet ? or: Is there a bathroom in the room?

I am sending this back... I would suggest you look further and save yourself the postage.