Cheap Learn Spanish Now! 9.0 (Software) (Macintosh, Windows) Price

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Customer Reviews of Learn Spanish Now! 9.0

Is this software good for anything besides improving listening comprehension and pronunciation?
As the editor of the Learning Spanish Products Reviews (LearningSpanishProductsReviews) site, one of my responsibilities is to review Spanish courses that are listed on Amazon. I am also a native Spanish speaker from Argentina and a professional private Spanish instructor. <
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>If I rated this product solely on the basis of content, it would receive more than 3 stars. Unfortunately, I have to also rate a product on the effectiveness of its teaching approach. Although this product has many hours of content, like most software based foreign-language learning products, it fails to provide an effective method for learning how to speak Spanish. <
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>But the software can be useful for improving your listening comprehension and pronunciation because it has lots of dialogues and with speakers from different Spanish speaking countries. <
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OK for working on pronunciation and listening
For all their intricate windowed presentation, these programs fail to present more than a few vocabulary words, offer no systematic presentation of grammar, and don't even have a voacabulary index. The screens devoted to letting you imitate native speakers can help you improve your pronunciation, but you will do that better and faster with a teacher or native speaker. Same for listening - there are simply too few selections to get you beyond learning to understand some rote passages. <
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>The exercises are very disppointing. They are randomly repetitive, so in a group of 5 questions (or activities, as they call them) you may end up doing the same one 5 times. <
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>Finally, there are outright errors in the English translations, in English spelling, and sometimes, at least in the Spanish version, in the Spanish spelling. <
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>On the whole, maybe worth purchasing cheap and used, but like most computer based language learning programs, you can do far, far better with a printed workbook that comes with a tape or CD.

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Best used as addition to other programs
The good side of this program is that you can click on each word separately to hear it pronounced slowly and then you can click on the entire sentence to hear it spoken at a normal speed. <
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>After going through the section with some essential words and phrases, there is a leap to dialogues and also to the language which moves to intermediate / advanced level. If you already speak Spanish, but your Spanish got a little bit rusty, this may be a fun way to review it. If you're just beginning to learn Spanish, this may be frustrating and you will need to supplement this program with other more solid books both related to language and grammar. <
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>On a side note, Transparent Language has additional CDs as add-ons to this program, which as far as I know are only available through their website. Add-ons deal with different applications of language - for business, travel, entertainment, literature, etc. There is a CD with a movie and it's old, old, old and not all that engaging. You may be better off just getting regular DVDs with Spanish tracks (the translations may be sometimes off, but it's much cheaper way to get used to spoken language). The only benefit of these add-ons is that you can click on each word separately to hear it first pronounced slowly as many times as you need to and then listen to the entire sentence or entire segment. <
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