Berlitz Latin American Spanish

Rating:
Summary: Not very helpful
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Not very helpful
Review: 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.