2008-06-21 Excellent if you're serious about learning Spanish

I've just completed both this and the advanced course and I think that they are both excellent and achieve very well what they set out to do.

I think that a lot of the criticism of the courses come from people who do not know before they buy them what Michel's methods are about.

These courses will -
- give you a solid grounding in the structure of the Spanish language
- teach American Spanish rather than Spanish Spanish if you get what I mean, though as far as I can tell the differences are mainly ones of pronunciation
- give you a great big boost of confidence after only a very short time; you will feel like you're learning really quickly.

The courses will not -
- give you Spanish that you can use for holidays. There are almost no nouns taught on this course and a limited number of verbs and other words. What it enables you to do is take the knowledge you gain from the course and apply it to new vocabulary. This means that you can then take your learning onto the specific things that you are interested in, rather than learning by rote numerous phrases that you will never use.
- give you the chance to hear native Spanish speakers talk. Having listened to American Spanish on tv programmes since doing the course, it isn't such a big deal, though I can't say the same for Spanish Spanish.

So if you're serious about learning the language and not just looking for a few phrases or the ability to read a menu then this could well be for you. But bear in mind before you buy them that you will need other reference material to take your studies further after you finish, whether it be lists of verbs or vocab or whether, as Michel suggests, you spend 10 minutes a day reading about subjects that interest you (in Spanish of course) and picking up the relevent vocab as you go along. But I'm sure that with any language course, you'd need to do this afterwards anyway.

As for those that can't get past the mouth sounds made by Michel sometimes when he speaks - you're letting a tiny thing make you miss out on a lot.