Living Spanish, Revised (Conv. Man)

This product is good for someone who has had an introductory course and understands how Spanish verbs are conjugated. It is a little more advanced than beginner's course helped me learn more!

Having read the previous reviews of this CD set, I wonder if I'm the only one who has enjoyed it. What excited me most about All-Audio Spanish was when I had listened to all 6 CDs and restarted Disk 1. I had felt a bit frustrated as the CDs progressed, feeling, as some other reviewers apparently have, that it was really fast. But when I started CD 1 again, and was able to speak along fairly well for the first few lessons (there are 35 total), I was really excited. I just completed a 17-hour drive, listening to the CDs the whole way, which was enough time to listen to all CDs twice. While I'm not nearly fluent, I'm amazed at how much of the conversation in the CDs I can actually understand. Particular features I like about the set: The book: since it's all-audio, the book isn't much; it basically lists the words used in the CDs (listed by lesson), along with their translations. There's also a section on the grammar rules discussed on the CDs. The reason I like the book is because it's concise, and makes referencing from the CDs easy. It's not necessary to reference the book while listening, but I have found it helpful to review the words of a lesson in the evening when I'm not driving. The organization: Each lesson is divided into lettered sections (i.e., Lesson 1a), from A to H. Each sub-lesson has it's own focus, such as new vocabulary words (A), or Hispanic cultural information (G). Depth of language coverage: As the lessons progress, the narrator always teaches new vocabulary, but goes through all modes of language use, such as past tense, future tense, subjunctive, etc., making each lesson valuable. Other language books I've read separate subjects out without integrating necessary information, so if you're not interested in learning about riding trains, for example, you can just skip the section. But in this set, a lot of what you learn in each section applies to all parts of the language. Difficulty format: What I mean by this is that the difficulty level goes up dramatically in the first 5 lessons (CD 1), and then stays there. Although you continue to learn new things, and there is necessarily some building on earlier lessons, the difficulty level stays about the same. Having said that, it's also wide open for continual learning. Since I'm not worried about completely understanding each lesson before tackling the next, it leaves me something else to learn when I come back to this lesson again. This also helps me retain the information that I do learn. Things that bugged me about All-Audio Spanish: Packaging: The CD holder in the box is not convenient for changing CDs when driving. The plastic is too stiff, too tight, and doesn't have a slit to make it easier to pull out the CD, making it necessary to touch front and back of the CD to pull it out (something I hate to do). Overlooked words: This is minor, because you pick it up as you go through the lessons, but it bugged me. First, at the beginning, when the linguists are demons

Most useful for its size. The key 2000 of 20000+ Spanish words are in caps. Concise, it doesn't waste your time but gives you a best return on your most precious investment -- your own effort. Its only real fault is that words referenced on the English section (appropriately somewhat smaller than the Spanish section) do not always appear in the Spanish section, and vice versa, though this fault seems universal in English-Spanish references. The only English-Espanol reference I liked well enough to send to our son in Peru.