Language teachers and learners will surely not be able to stop raving about Tell Me More Spanish. It delivers on all its claims, in every category. For people who are a bit nervous about downloading programs: relax. For those who are skeptical about whether using a computer is an effective way to begin learning a foreign language: this program will change and blow your mind. Auralog's Tell Me More Spanish lets learners either roam free or be guided through lessons and activities as the program assesses their progress.
Its 15 lessons as well as cultural, grammar, vocabulary, and written workshops have 37 different learning activities, totalling 900 hours' running time of material. The environments are amazingly rich and well assembled. There are two beginner DVDs, one for Peninsular (Spain) Spanish and another for Latin American Spanish; someone was really thinking.
The Auralog technical designers and language experts who developed this program deserve high praise for creating this computer-assisted language curriculum. It is visually engaging, intellectually stimulating, and ultimately effective. This is an easy program to navigate through, whether you select the free-to-roam or guided mode of instruction. The voice recognition is sensitive enough to capture subtleties and, what ultimately judges such a feature's worth, it renders a waveform graph that is easy to read and assess.
The voice recognition also scores your pronunciation for each attempt in an easy-to-read bar graph. It's a hands-off feature--no distracting clicking is necessary in order to record your voice. This feature, along with the 3D animation of a translucent head that pronounces the various sounds of the language (with a real human voice) will be encouraging to those who have despaired of ever learning to better pronounce Spanish.
The silent, online tutorials are brief and unobtrusive. They show users exactly where to click and in what order, for each activity, thus eliminating the frustration or anxiety many people experience when confronting a new program. Each grammar explanation is also concise and the use of "Ud." and "Uds." (formal "you," singular and plural, respectively) is noted each time a verb is shown in conjugated form. Tell Me More Spanish has no downside, except that it is hard to stop using!
Auralog also produced a previous iteration of this instructional software (now licensed by Topics Entertainment), and although this new product looks like the old one at the screen level, Auralog has added a vast amount of material and would seem to have improved the navigation as well. Now, users may also select the interface language of their choice when setting up the program: German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, or Netherlands. Clearly, though, most of the improvements were done "under the hood" --this was not just a paint job.
