TeachMe! Spanish Reviewer's Comments

The TeachMe! program states that there are two main goals when attempting to learn a language; anyone with a goal of fluency needs to build a vocabulary of at least 2000 words and must understand the rules of grammar. TeachMe! Spanish does a good job both building vocabulary and demonstrating the rules of grammar in the Spanish language. It is also pretty easy to navigate and transfer between learning modules.

However the teaching method isn’t quite as effective as that in other programs we reviewed, and the speech recognition system was not as accurate either.

Features:  

TeachMe! Spanish offers many convenient features to help you learn a foreign language. The program includes a personal progress tracking feature that assesses your progress and displays this information in a line scale. When you succeed, the line is elevated and when you are struggling, the line angles down. You must attain a satisfactory rating to advance to the next chapter. To assess your long-term progress, your score for each level of the program is displayed in the Monitor Progress section.

Fundamentals:  

The program is divided into four sections including vocabulary lessons, grammar exercises, stories and pronunciation. This program does not determine the quality of your pronunciation with great accuracy, but it can compare your pronunciation with a native Spanish-speaking voice. TeachMe! Spanish can then rate your pronunciation as poor, acceptable or good. This program does cover fundamentals, but the focus is mainly on vocabulary and grammar. TeachMe! Spanish does not offer much practice for conversational skills, however, and these skills are essential to become fluent in Spanish.

Ease of Use:  

This program was easy to use. The navigation was simple and straightforward. The help program was self-explanatory and answered our questions well.

Teaching Tools:  

There are three modes you may choose from to answer questions in the program. The most challenging, Normal Mode requires you to write out each Spanish word in full. In Auto Word Mode, you are only required to type the first letter of the word (then the rest is automatically filled in). In the third mode, Browse Mode, you can access the all the lessons with the answers filled in-like looking through the teacher's answer book. You can change modes at will to adjust each lesson to test your skill (normal mode), study the answers (browse mode) or practice a combination of both (auto word mode).

This software includes an excellent story program. There are several different stories to help you gain Spanish language comprehension by giving you the task of plugging appropriate words into place throughout each story.

This program includes a feature to assess its effectiveness in teaching. There is a segment which determines your active and passive vocabulary retention. Active vocabulary includes words that you understand and can actively use in conversation. Passive vocabulary includes words that you can understand but may not recall when conversing. TeachMe! Spanish is an excellent beginning to acquiring Spanish fluency, but it will not accomplish complete fluency.

Word Tools:  

TeachMe! includes a simple dictionary function for researching and translating words.

Help/Support:  

You can contact the developers of TeachMe!, Linguashop, through phone or email support systems. There is not a FAQ section, but the help section at the beginning of the program answered many of our questions about the software.

Summary:  

TeachMe! Spanish is an easy program to use. The software does an good job instructing in vocabulary and the basic grammar rules, but if you wish to gain complete Spanish fluency there are better programs on the market.