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Rating: 
Summary: Innovation Meets Shoddy Production Values
Review: Dr. Blair has gone out of his way to discover and invent unconventional methods for language learning. His Power-Glide course is a rich collection of fresh ideas, some of which should be suitable to any person's learning style.The set comes with a thick course manual, slim academic guide, 9 audio CDs and one computer CD. The course consists of 160 or so lesson segments that build upon each other and get progressively harder. Lesson 1 gets off to a good start, opening an adventure in which you are a secret agent sneaking into a strange island to solve a mystery. The language learning is woven into the story, but the story soon degenerates into a series of lame excuses for you to do an endless series of drills and exercises. My biggest complaint about the product is the poor quality of the voice talent. Dr. Blair often seems to think we'd rather listen to his obvious American accent than to a native Spanish speaker. I'll avoid the temptation to make fun of the other voice actors (most of whom suspiciously have the same last name as the course creator). I'll go as far as saying the voices on the CDs quickly degenerate from (unintentionally) comical to unbearable. They obviously saved some money by not bringing in professional voices, and the result is a shoddy, unprofessional-sounding package. Power-Glide gets points for originality, and has a wealth of ideas for teachers. But as a consumer product, the awful audio gives it limited use, making it hard to justify the hefty price tag.
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