Colloquial Spanish of Latin America: A Complete Language Course (The Colloquial Series/Book & Cassette)

Rating:
Summary: Book Good / Cassette Bad
Review: It's a good workbook to use after you have studied the basic, intro to Spanish books and tapes. There are some good exercises that build upon basic Spanish. However, I think it benefits to listen to spoken Spanish in any language course, and the major downfall in this one is the English narrator on the tapes. Imagine your most boring, nasal impaired, sleep producing college professor -- that's the guy narrating. There is also an irritating "ding" every time a translation occurs. If you are already proficient in Spanish vocabulary & are looking for a general workbook to hone up your skills, buy only the book; you will benefit from it. However, if you need to listen to spoken Spanish (like I do) to build and reinforce your pronunciation skills, skip both.

Rating:
Summary: Book Good / Cassette Bad
Review: It's a good workbook to use after you have studied the basic, intro to Spanish books and tapes. There are some good exercises that build upon basic Spanish. However, I think it benefits to listen to spoken Spanish in any language course, and the major downfall in this one is the English narrator on the tapes. Imagine your most boring, nasal impaired, sleep producing college professor -- that's the guy narrating. There is also an irritating "ding" every time a translation occurs. If you are already proficient in Spanish vocabulary & are looking for a general workbook to hone up your skills, buy only the book; you will benefit from it. However, if you need to listen to spoken Spanish (like I do) to build and reinforce your pronunciation skills, skip both.

Rating:
Summary: Look elsewhere
Review: Most books in the Colloquial series are very good indeed, but this one is a sad exception. The main drawback is the fact that it lacks vocabularies after the dialogues(!) - meaning that you have to work it out yourself and you don't really know which words to learn. If you already speak (European) Spanish this book is very helpful as it highlights the differences that exist in Latin America. Unless you already speak Spanish this will be a total waste of your money and I'd recommend some other book.

Rating:
Summary: Good contemporary textbook, needs more practice part
Review: This book and cassettes guide you from the very basic of the Spanish language to the intermediate level in a step-by-step way. After you have completed this book, you should have a basic knowledge and can understand and make yourself understood in many of the situations you might encounter in Latin America. The contents of each lesson are selected so that you will become familiar with various aspects of life in Latin America. Also, the topics are presented in a slightly different manner from one lesson to the next, making learning less boring. My only complaint with this course is that it needs more practice part. This is especially true with the accompanying cassettes, which has only two hours of recording in total, apparently far few hours to achieve fluency. The conversations are usually recorded only once and without any pause between sentences for you to repeat them. In fact, the tapes do not force you to practice so you must find some way for practice, using this book or other. Of course, I understand that including a very comprehensive practice, such as repetition, transformation, substitution and so on is beyond the scope of this kind of textbooks but if there is such a course then it would be a tremendous help for students. The contents of the lessons are practical and contemporary without becoming too much specific. All in all, I found this book to be a good value but if you are looking for something that makes you practice you have to supplement this with additional materials.