Traveller’s Spanish by Elisabeth Smith
Did you know that Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the world, after Chinese? Well check out Wikipedia. If you’re thinking of picking up a third language, for practical uses or simply to stimulate your mind, Spanish makes a good choice.
Elisabeth Smith’s “Traveller’s Spanish” is a self0learning resource consisting of a 146-page paperback book and an audio CD. It promises 450 useful words and expressions for travels, flashcards for extra practice and revision, and only the essentials for speaking without having to learn the grammar (which is often intimidating for a newbie). The audio course is incredibly helpful as you can listen to it on-the-go to hone your listening and pronunciation while giving your eyes a break.
The book covers every day situations one would come across when travelling – self-introductions, shopping, dining, public transport, directions and the like. There is a concentration on learning only 350 words, which are sufficient to get by without being ovenwhelming. The resource recommends studying the book and the CD for 35 minutes a day over six weeks, and the audio course is timed and structured according to this time format. This is highly practical and commendable. Not only does it fit into a hectic day, it allows you to make the most of the lesson before your concentration wanes. There are opportunities to practise your verbal skills and you can reinforce what you have learnt through tests at the end of each chapter.
Overall, this publication is easy to follow, well-structured and teaches the essentials, and the audio is pleasant to listen to. However, according to reviews by some users completely new to learning the language, they found the long sample dialogues placed at the beginning of each track to be daunting, although the dialogues would later be broken down for the user to comprehend. They felt it would have been better if the course starts off with more basic dialogues to allow users to get used to the verbs and pronunciation. Nonetheless, multiple replays would likely help to alleviate this issue and give the new listeners more confidence.
– This review first appeared in a lifestyle magazine
