Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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335 of 341 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best I've seen, October 22, 2003
I looked at four or five Spanish programs before buying this one, and it seemed to be the most complete and feature-packed. After doing some research on it, I was told to look for the American Foreign Service Institute's Spanish language course, but I haven't been able to find that, so I bought this instead. I have the 8-CD version. Three of the CDs are audio ones for pronunciation; the other five relate to the lessons plans and other visual material.I installed it and worked with it for a couple of hours for the first time this morning and I have to admit I was impressed. The interface is quite attractive and easy to navigate, and is one of the best I've seen in a teaching program, or any program, for that matter. I've worked most of the way through the first main lesson and several dozen exercises so far, so I have a pretty good idea of how everything works at this point, and it's pretty slick. This program is so feature-packed that I don't know if I'll even use some of the features, but they're there if you want them. Besides the 20 lessons, 10 review lessons, and 20 different "activities," the 19,000 word dictionary, and 8,000 word glossary, which form the core of the course, there are some interesting extra features. For example, there are even Spanish crossword puzzles, which might be good for learning synonyms and getting you to think more in Spanish. Another interesting exercise is matching antonyms, like the verbal part of the SAT requires. Another nice feature is automatic tracking of your lesson progress and what quizzes and lessons you've completed, so you can go right to where you left off, and even audio error tracking of your pronunciation. Actually, in regard to the lesson tracking, there is just one gotcha I noticed here--which is that when returning to the lesson in progress you are popped to the beginning of the lesson and you have to page forward from there to where you left off, but that only takes a few seconds. You can see where you left off visually from the chart that shows your progress, which is okay. Each lesson has vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar, and audio pronunciation of the words and phrases so you can hear correct-sounding Spanish right as you go along. And there are both male and female speakers. A lot of thought has gone into the interface here. For example, if you don't remember the meaning of a particular word, just positioning your mouse cursor over it will pop up the definition. You can also jump directly to the dictionary if you need to. As I said, a very nice interface. My only complaint is that only the first CD actually seems to install on your hard disk. Apparently if you need the others, the program will ask for them. And I don't know how this will work with the three other CDs of audio material, but I guess I'll find out. I would prefer the whole program just install onto disk so you don't have to do the "CD shuffle." Overall, however, this looks to be an excellent Spanish language software program, and I'm quite pleased with it so far.
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151 of 154 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great for Spanish Review, April 26, 2004
I've had the program for a week and a half and am working on the second disk now. It is a very good program for reviewing Spanish (I had Spanish all through HS, through AP Spanish Lit, but I haven't used it since), but I can see how it might be difficult for the true beginner. If you're looking to review Spanish and don't want to be bored with tedious exercises about stuff you already know (or just need to be briefly reminded of), then this is the program for you. While it might not be the most entertaining program available, I haven't been bored and have learned a lot. There are many types of exercises, which keep things interesting while working different skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking).They definitely throw you right in, but the first exercise doesn't have any wrong answers, they just want you to pick an answer and see what happens. If you roll the mouse over a word the definition pops up in a little box, which is very convenient. There are lessons for learning vocabulary and grammar, but most of the time you are left to figure things out as you go (with the help of those pop-up definitions). The first half of each lesson group is point-and-click with the mouse, while the second half uses speech recognition (one of the best features of the program), so you need a microphone. You also need a Spanish <-> English dictionary, as the built-in glossary isn't easy to negotiate. There doesn't seem to be a search function and it's all Spanish to English. You have to click on a tab for the first letter of the word, then click to advance the "pages" to get to the word you want. It's much more convenient to just reach for the dictionary than to find a word in the glossary (and I've needed to do so many times). The glossary does work well from within some parts of the lessons, where if you right click on an answer choice you can go straight to that entry in the glossary, but for others (e.g. the crosswords), you don't seem to have access to the glossary at all. Technical stuff: I have Win XP and the software has run very well on my computer except for one thing--it doesn't seem to be able to access the data for a user (or create a user) unless you run the program as an administrator. There might be some other way to get it to work, but if so, I haven't found it. No big deal, but a little annoying. The first CD installs on the computer, then when you finish that one, you just switch CDs and continue where you left off. The program doesn't ask for them--but it's pretty obvious what to do. I haven't run the audio CDs on the computer, but they seem to be entirely separate from the computer lessons. I listened to the first one, and I'd actually recommend listening to the CDs before starting the program if you are a beginner--they're much more basic.
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Spanish: Spain-style, not Latin-style, September 19, 2005
Most of the other reviews listed here are pretty accurate. You definitely get "immersed", but that's the point. It can be a little overwhelming at first, but I guess it gets better. Get a separate spanish-english dictionary, though, because the one in the program sucks, as does the entire interface.
My biggest complaint is in the packaging: it clearly shows a picture of Mexico, although most of the Spanish they teach is from Spain (at least from what I could tell, the lisp was driving me crazy). For those of you who don't know the difference, think of British vs. American english...while you'll be able to get around, you're going to sound funny and use the wrong words for things. So if you're looking to learn Spanish, Latin American-style, this isn't for you. But if you want to learn the basic language and/or learn to speak with a lisp, knock yourself out.
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