Rating: 
Summary: A good source for drilling yourself
Review: I really enjoyed this guide and CD set (which is available). The book was the weak point, with some basically useless phoneticized spellings for helping pronunciation. But overall, it was good for the very large number of drills. Also, the extensive beginning section on pronunciation really REALLY helped my pronun.
Rating:
Summary: A good source for drilling yourself
Review: I really enjoyed this guide and CD set (which is available). The book was the weak point, with some basically useless phoneticized spellings for helping pronunciation. But overall, it was good for the very large number of drills. Also, the extensive beginning section on pronunciation really REALLY helped my pronun.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a very good course for true beginners.
Review: I was very disappointed with this audio cassette course. Thank goodness, I had already successfully completed a full semester of Basic Spanish at a community college. Otherwise, I would have been completely lost. The book is basically useless and the cassette tapes are not much better. There are a lot of vocabulary drills, however, the book fails to identify the translation of the majority of these words in English. I understand the drills are intended to enhance your vocabulary, but you have no idea what you're saying in Spanish. A lot of the phrases are repeated in reverse order and I clearly don't understand the purpose behind that. I also feel the grammer drills are too advanced for a true beginner and fail to provide you with the basics for real life situations.
Rating:
Summary: Not very useful for a beginner
Review: I wouldn't recommend this program for a beginner. The tapes are not very good, the people on the tapes speak so fast it's hard to learn the pronunciation of words. The study course is absolutely dull as well.
Rating:
Summary: Solid But Not Perfect
Review: I'm using the two Barron's tape sets along with the video series, Destinos, to teach myself Spanish. Destinos presents a much wider range of vocabulary and situations, but since (if you're using it on your own) you don't speak back to it, a lot of your learning is passive. The Barron's set gets you into a more active mode. The dialogues can be quite sexist--lots of comments about sexy brunettes, fat girls with glasses, etc.-- and you almost never hear a female speaker. Still, they and the drills are effective and well-designed from a language-learning point of view. The guys on the tapes speak at a realistic pace, not in the exaggerated, artificially slow language typical of beginning language courses--and the drills force you to respond quickly, too. The accompanying book is not terribly informative; for grammar issues I've relied on my knowledge of French and Latin. This probably isn't the best choice for a rank beginner, but if you already know another romance language, or if you've taken a little Spanish in school and want to get better, it's a solid course.
Rating: 
Summary: Parts 3 and 4
Review: Many, mainly positive reviews, have been written about this course. I absolutely agree. This course is old, but the best I have found so far. The only information missing (and Barron's won't tell you) is that part three and four of this course are available from Audioforum... under the titles Advanced Spanish A and B, for 185.- each. There the subjunctive and the rest of the grammar is introduced.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Out of date. I really enjoyed and learned a lot from the Barron's Foreign Service Institute French I and II courses, so was expecting a similar experience here. Unfortunately, this course is not as good. As others have complained, the speed of the speakers, though probably authentic, is much too fast for a beginner and the voices of the two characters are not different enough in tone to be easily distinguished. The tapes for Spanish I should have been done more slowly and distinctly. Worse, I found myself continually annoyed because of the out of date, male centered situations and conversation. As a tourist visitor, I need less on finding apartments and maids, more on social encounters. I find myself wondering why I'm learning how to say "Man, that's good whiskey!" "Tell the girl who cleans to take your dirty clothes to the laundry." The thing I did learn from this program was that if I had been in the diplomatic corps in the 50's, I would have preferred life in France! Yes they do cover the verb, pronouns and other grammar issues better than most, but they speak so fast that you will have to be looking at the book all the time, at least through level I, and if you're a woman, you will feel what it was like to live in a macho, (smoking) male centered culture in the 1950s.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Out of date. I really enjoyed and learned a lot from the Barron's Foreign Service Institute French I and II courses, so was expecting a similar experience here. Unfortunately, this course is not as good. As others have complained, the speed of the speakers, though probably authentic, is much too fast for a beginner and the voices of the two characters are not different enough in tone to be easily distinguished. The tapes for Spanish I should have been done more slowly and distinctly. Worse, I found myself continually annoyed because of the out of date, male centered situations and conversation. As a tourist visitor, I need less on finding apartments and maids, more on social encounters. I find myself wondering why I'm learning how to say "Man, that's good whiskey!" "Tell the girl who cleans to take your dirty clothes to the laundry." The thing I did learn from this program was that if I had been in the diplomatic corps in the 50's, I would have preferred life in France! Yes they do cover the verb, pronouns and other grammar issues better than most, but they speak so fast that you will have to be looking at the book all the time, at least through level I, and if you're a woman, you will feel what it was like to live in a macho, (smoking) male centered culture in the 1950s.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty good course
Review: The best point of this package is the 12 cassettes. They're well laid out and use a variety of different types of drills to take you through different aspects of each lesson. You've done a lot by the time you're through.However, I'm glad I took some classes beforehand because the book is pretty weak. There's not much in the way of explanation of grammatical points, and the size of the book could have been reduced by a third by removing the useless pronunciation guide. (Why don't I just listen to the cassettes to get the pronunciation?). If you buy this, you'd better shell out for a grammar guide, too. Despite the book, I liked the tapes well enough to order the next set.
Rating:
Summary: Thorough but dry and dull
Review: This is the big one. It will take you months to get through but by the time you are finished, you should know the language well. The problem is that it is very dull. The book has phonetic transcriptions of everything-something most people won't care about. I found that the transcriptions were distracting and I eventually ignored them. The dialogues are quite dull. This need to be livened up a bit.
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