Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you have ever taken a foreign language class at school, this is a totally different way to learn. It is based on the concept of immersion, the way you learned your native language as a child or the way you’d learn a foreign language in a place where no one spoke English at all. You’d be forced to observe what was going on and associate it all with what people are saying. The lessons include listening, reading, speaking and writing. Everything has pictures of people, things, places and people doing various things like cooking, running, eating or reading. There is no English used at any time, only Spanish. You learn grammar as part of sentences, but grammar rules are not taught, as they are in a traditional classroom. There is a lot of process of elimination and multiple choice as you click on pictures, vocabulary items and phrases. There are 20 units, each with 33 lessons that each take between 5 and 30 minutes. There is also a Phrasebook with sections such as how to order in a restaurant, check into a hotel, or go to a doctor. The set comes with all of the permanently downloadable lessons, a large and very complete Barron’s Spanish/English dictionary and a small grammar book to help you with rules. It is very well done and I can’t imagine learning a language without some actual explanation of grammar rules. Because you can keep the downloaded lessons forever, you have the advantage of being able to go back and repeat them as needed, or use the Phrasebook, regardless of whether your online subscription has expired. This also comes with a 24-month subscription to all of the online services and it allows you to use everything on multiple devices. I use mine on a MacBook Air laptop and an iPhone 7 and everything seems to work perfectly. I had to download the app for my phone. I actually enjoy using the program more on my phone because of the touchscreen. A lot of the time, the task that you are doing is selecting a picture or a phrase on the screen and the touchscreen is easier than mousing for me. I don’t have a tablet but I imagine that would be optimal because of the touchscreen and the larger screen so that the pictures would be bigger than on the phone. Whatever I do on one device is caught up on the other because it’s all connected online through the subscription. However, once the 24 months is over, I’ll only be able to use the downloaded lessons on my laptop. The subscription also allows you to chat with native speakers and other learners and play games with other people learning your own native language. So I am an English speaker learning Spanish and I can interact online with Spanish speakers learning English.   I had 3 years of formal Spanish instruction in high school, a long time ago, but have not had much opportunity or need to use Spanish. The result is that I understand a lot more than I feel comfortable speaking. I can read quite a bit but it is difficult for me to understand people speaking because they are going too fast. I have always thought that if I could be immersed somewhere that no one spoke English, I could be fluent in Spanish pretty quickly because it would force me to use the Spanish. It is doubtful that will ever happen though, and I think this course is about as close as you can get. The lessons where you are just listening and can’t see the words in print are very helpful. My biggest complaint is that, other than being able to skip lessons you don’t want to do, the program does not alter itself based on your performance. So the first couple of units, the most basic part, are all review for me to the point of being a waste of time. Review is a good thing, though I don’t need to be taught elementary things like numbers and colors. But as I am getting into the more advanced lessons, it is getting to be fun and I am learning things I never picked up in school. I am hoping to learn enough to use confidently when I travel and with the many native Spanish speakers where I live.