Barron's Mastering Spanish - Audio CD And Book Spanish Course
Comprehensive is one of the best words to describe Barron's Mastering Spanish course. It's a big course, with 11 audio CDs and a thick, 678-page book. This set is designed for serious Spanish study and learning. And it's developed by the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State. It's basically a part of what the US Government uses to train diplomats who need to be able to speak Spanish fluently. So, if you're really serious about learning Spanish, and learning it well, then this course is for you.
A lot of nice and short CD tracks allow you to quickly and easily skip around to new material you need to learn. Without having to be bored with what you already know.
The audio CD is presented in full conversation speed by native Spanish speakers. The book contains phoenetic spellings of all the phrases to help you learn the pronunciation.
It's a large course. To help you navigate it and work with it, the CDs are all marked with a unit number and the page in the book the disk starts at. The narrator also tells you this information at the start of each disk.
A typical unit has several methods of instruction including:
- Drills and grammar.
- Substitution drills - Where you make new sentences by changing a word.
- Response drill - Where a question is asked, then an appropriate response is supplied. (all in Spanish)
- Translation drill - Popular English phrases accompanied by their Spanish translation along with phonetic spelling.
- Discussion - Where's quite a bit of text teaching where several hundred words of text will teach and explain a key language concept. (A lot of courses omit this valuable information.)
- Review drill - Your chance to find out how much you learned.
- Conversations, dialogues, and narratives.
The appendix contains a vocabulary section that lists all the words that are taught along with the unit and section number where they're presented.
Features
- Large course - 11 disks and 678 pages.
- Suggested retail is $100.00.
- Used by the United States Government.