Complete Spanish Learning Suite

Rating:
Summary: Powerful suite although possibly too involved for some
Review: This learning suite consists of about half a dozen programs, each of which does different things and offers different features. I found it very complete and full-featured but somewhat difficult to navigate around because of all the activities and separate modules. Also, it's hard to tell what some of the mouse buttons mean and you just have to click on them to find out what they do.

Four of the programs, such as the Spanish Alphabet Reference and the Spanish Grammar Basics, install as separate applications and can be launched either separately or from within the main program. You'll find the latter two under "Reference" from the main menu.

The main program is called Language Now! which has all the main features. These include My Spanish Adventure with Andre, which shows you a movie with Spanish narration; Conversations in Spanish; Fundamental Spanish, which contains 100 of the most common words and verbs in Spanish; and Survival Phrases in Spanish, which contains hundreds of phrases in English and Spanish.

Also part of the Language Now! program is the pronunciation program, or digital speech analyzer, which combines a wave form anayzer, pitch analyzer, a fricatives analyzer, and a vowels analyzer, which is even more sophisticated than the one that comes with my Instant Immersion Deluxe Spanish program.

The Survival Phrases section in the main program has phrases for over 30 situations, such as "Meeting and Greeting," "Restaurants," "Emergencies," etc. There is also an Activities area which has games like crosswords, word dictation, Vocabulous!, Unscramble, Verb Quest, Plug-n-Play, and Graffiti. In addition, there is a Pronunciation section and Conversation and Speaking section.

The four smaller extra programs include the "English-Spanish Lexicon" or dictionary, the grammar program, called "Spanish Grammar Pro," which is structured like the Windows Help facility, so if you know that, you know how to get around this one too. It might even be different from the one accessed within the "Language Now!" rogram. The third program is called "Shooting Gallery and Crossword," which are sort of self-explanatory. The fourth one is "Before You Know It," which is basically a vocabulary building module almost 40 different word lists on such things as animals, food, clothing, the weather, travel, and so on.

It also includes a "Flash Card" program which I tried, but didn't find very useful. It only seemed to have a few dozen words and it repeated them too often to be of much help, I thought. I liked the Spanish Grammar Basics program which covers in detail all the different parts of speech and defines all of them for you. So if you need to be reminded about what demonstrative pronouns are, a periphrastic verbal construction, or the preterite (past perfect) tense, this will do it for you.

Overall, this is a very full-featured and powerful Spanish suite that I can recommend although it may take some time for you to learn to use all the features productively. For someone that doesn't want anything this complex I recommend the Instant Immersion Spanish Deluxe edition with 8 CD's instead. It also has a speech analyzer but the entire program is structured somewhat differently from the present one. The lessons are sequential and you have to complete them all in order to progress from Beginner Level I to Level II, and from Level II to Intermediate Level I, the Intermediate Level II, and so on. (This isn't quite true as you can jump between levels and CD's if you want, but the program keeps reminding you to do exercises you've skipped within a CD or difficulty level until you do them). This makes it a little more structured and less flexible than the present one although I think most people will find the interface more intuitive and the progressively increasingly level of difficulty in some ways better for learning. But both programs are excellent and will definitely help you take your Spanish to the next level.