Instant Immersion Spanish

Rating:
Summary: Helpful for comprehension
Review: I had the equivalent of about a semester's worth of college Spanish before buying Instant Immersion Spanish. I already knew many of the words and rules of grammar taught on the CDs but I found the Instant Immersion lessons very useful anyway for improving my comprehension. Each conversation is repeated three times. The first time there is an English translation after each sentence. The second time each sentence is broken down into individual words and phrases. The third time the conversation takes place without any translation.
The course is taught without any follow-along text or reference book, which I believe is helping me to absorb Spanish words without mentally translating each one from Spanish to English in my head first. I don't know how well this method would work for someone completely new to the language, but I don't think there's any one correct way to learn. These tapes have been a good supplement to my grammar intensive Spanish courses.

Rating:
Summary: A pretty useful set of CDs to learn Spanish
Review: Speaking Spanish is a very useful skill, whether you live and work in states like Florida, or California, with their large Hispanic populations, or if you just want to travel to the Spanish speaking islands and countries in the hemisphere. Modern digital technology makes learning Spanish a lot easier than it used to be.

When I first learned foreign languages back in the 60's, we used state-of-the art language laboratories in which each student had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a microphone, and rubbery earphones whose smell I still remember today. Now you can take this set of CDs and play them in your car as you travel, listen on a plane or in an airport lounge (assuming you have a Walkman type CD player) or indeed in bed. But however convenient it may be, learning a foreign language still needs considerable effort on your part, and the more you put in the more you will extract.

There are several aspects to learning a language, which include speaking yourself, understanding what is said to you, reading the language, and writing it. These discs provide a series of full-service lessons that introduce you to vocabulary and grammatical rules, provide exercises, then get you listening to some dialogues in Spanish which gradually ramp up to full speed with background noises, so they are excellent for helping you develop an ear for listening to Spanish speech.

If you use them alone, they are not going to have you speaking fluent Spanish in a week or two, but I think they are excellent resources to use in combination with others to learn Spanish. I also am using another set of discs that is just phrases to repeat, and a small book that is designed for Complete Idiots, but can be used by others.

At the very reasonable prices for these discs, you can't go wrong, but don't expect it to be easy. It can be hard work, and sometimes hearing the tone signalling the end of the final lesson on the disc can be a great relief.