Reasonably good for a holiday, not for more general interest users
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This claims to teach the user "conversational" Spanish, and thus the reader can be forgiven for thinking that at the end of the course, we could indulge in any conversation with a Spanish speaker. In reality, the course is little more than an audio phrase book, clearly aimed at the needs of a traveller on a short holiday (e.g. exercises about how to complain about your hotel room) and not the more general interest Spanish language student. This may be more of an issue to some users than others, but to me it was a bit disappointing.
The format is to have an English narrator guide us through the course. We listen to a short dialogue between two Spanish speakers, and then we take it in turns to be each person in the dialogue, with a brief pause in between "our part". I found this reasonably useful, and liked being able to play both parts, unlike most language courses where you only play one. The third and final CD is the strongest part of the course, and uses very realistic clips. In one exercise, a train station announcement in Spanish even has the "echo" like quality of a public address system, adding to the realism. The first two CDs are rather more tame.
All in all, this is a very useful course for holiday makers who don't want to have to reach for a phrase book everytime they want to buy something. However, it is aimed at holiday makers, not general interest students, and you should decide which you are before you buy it.
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Pretty good , but some silly points
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A good collection of three CDs and booklet .
Most of the recordings are very clear except for about a third of them where the authors have stupidly placed 'atmospheric' sounds in the background . While these sounds add absolutely nothing to the 'authenticity' of these staged conversations , they do have the effect of making it just a little bit harder for the beginner to discern words among the 'foreign' spoken sounds .
For irony , the spoken English instructions are in received pronunciation , and paced slow enough for a mental retard to follow .
Yet , overall , not a bad effort compared with most of the lousey language recordings out there ...
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