Immersionplus Spanish Complete: The Final Step to Fluency!

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Summary: Building your Spanish ear...
Review: Learning to read, write, and speak a foreign language is challenging but the hardest step is listening and understanding. Native speakers seem to speak quickly and don't cooperate by using vocabulary words that you know! You can hold a very slow one-on-one conversation but the evening news blows by quickly with you recognizing only words here and there. This CD set is designed to help with this problem. It consists of 7 dialogues (for example, a couple discussing where to go for dinner). Each dialogue is presented 3 time - once at a native rate, once slowly, and again at a native rate (each in its own track). Additionally, a booklet provides the text in both Spanish and English. Each time you listen, you pick up more and more and get basic comprehension (rather than trying to literally translate word-for-word and losing track of the conversation). It's much better than turning on the Spanish channel on cable because you can listen to the dialogues over and over and, if you really get stuck, can look up the text. You need to be comfortable with a variety of verb tenses/moods (e.g., the subjunctive comes up often as it does in real life) so this would be most useful for an intermediate or advanced student.