Spanish Super Pack (With Ease) (Spanish Edition)

I completed this course, including every written exercise for every lesson. This course is great for self-study but in my opinion, requires a daily commitment of effort (which is generally the case for language learning anyways), but I stress this fact because it has 100 lessons, which, at the rate of one per day, would take well over three months to complete.First, this course teaches the Spainish of Spain, not Latin America (though sometimes they make references to it). The publisher is French, and the target audience is other Europeans who want to visit Spain. No complaining about this! The actors speak with "distinción", which is to say, that soft c/z sound like the "th" in "think" /θ/, and s is just /s/ like in "see". That means the words like "raza"/"rasa" or "siento"/"ciento" do not sound the same.There are 100 lessons with every 7th lesson being a "review" lesson (dialogue made up of rehashed old material + grammar notes). Lessons are in the form of bilingual text, with each sentence numbered. The English text is usually natural and where Spanish and English don't align well, the author has put some literal translations in parentheses to help you assimilate the meanings. There are also footnotes in the Spanish text that help to provide some minimal explanation or provide some explanation on the origin of an idiom. They sometimes give other examples of usage that would be too tedious too integrate into dialogue of the lesson itself. The lessons are usually funny or informative about the culture of Spain. Every now and then, one lesson seemed a bit less interesting, but overall, the course was fantastic. After the lesson content, there are two sets of exercises. The first one is simple translation (English -> Spanish) and are recorded. I used these to practice transcription. The second set of lessons are fill-in-the blank and are not recorded. Answers to these lessons appear a bit later.There are four voice actors and they do well with intonation and pronounce things clearly. Each lesson is fully recorded in Spanish. There is no English on the CDs. This sounds like it isn't important, but consider this: Other courses claim to have hours and hours of audio, but then a large amount of that audio ends up being silence or English. Trimming that out, you end up with 20-45 minutes of actual Spanish exposure. Assimil is hours, literally, of just Spanish.Spanish has a very rich verb system. This book teaches all of the grammar of verbs: present, preterite, present perfect (have verbed), imperfect, past perfect (had verbed), conditional, future, present subjunctive, imperfect subjunctive, and compound tenses ("would have verbed", "will have been verbed", etc.). I felt like they didn't do as much with less common tenses as they could have, but for more practice/exposure, they have an advanced course (for French speakers).The pacing in these lessons was pretty good for me, but I also was able to practice a bit with others. I religiously did one lesson per day, spending about 30-60 minutes per. I didn't make flashcards from the difficult or uncommon vocabulary/phrases, but I think I should have. Some words are only repeated a couple of times or not at all, but they are usually less important words in your fluency journey (e.g. "brakes [of a car]"). However, many common idioms and interjections do appear many times, which really helped me express myself.I did the so-called "active wave" for a while, but since it nearly doubled my daily workload with little real benefit beyond just simply reviewing the lessons, I didn't continue it beyond maybe 30 lessons. As described in the book, the active wave is the process they suggest you start when you've reached lesson 50 in the book. It consists of returning to lesson 1, covering the Spanish translation, and then translating the English back to Spanish and comparing your efforts. The inline parenthetical notes help you when the word choice or order is not obvious or literal. It could help solidify certain vocabulary or improve my written skills, but I didn't remain convinced that it was the best use of my time. These courses are what you make of them, so your mileage may vary.The grammar reference in the back of the book is superb as well, and it contains a number of stock phrases that you might find in a conversation guide book. There is a two-way dictionary (en->es, es->en) with each word marked with the lesson in which it appears. Yes, that's right, the dictionary doesn't just contain random words, but instead every word has a lesson associated with it!

I wanted to purchase this because so many language blogs & forums speak so highly of it! At first I found it a little confusing - it's set up like a dual language reader, only to save space they did not align the sections of each lesson. Which I get, because some sections take a lot more explanation than others...but for a few more pages it could have been a much better user experience. It's just kind of disorienting when, say, the transcript of sentence 2 of the dialog can only be reached with a page turn while translation of sentences 1,2,3, & 4 are all back with transcript of sentence 1...because things don't line up there is a little arrow telling you to where to move to the opposite page. I also need to whip out reading glasses because the print is so small. I must admit it's small size is easy to pack and carry around, though.The first lesson does not seem promising, as the voice actors are speaking slowly and weird and the dialog is weak. This goes on for several lessons. But then when you least expect it, suddenly those little tiny lessons are packed - PACKED - with content: new words you don't know or words you do know used in ways you haven't seen before. All in context in dialog that is believable. And the voices sound great and are speaking more of a normal speed by that time. Suddenly that little five line lesson is taking an hour to study for.So now I get why the polyglots love it - it is a vocabulary cram and the verb conjugation gets picked up naturally. Each little dialog is a lesson, and sometimes quite nuanced. It forces you to become a student. And the little snippet of audio that encompasses that lesson is somehow more important than a half hour of learn in your car audio. The whole course -- life-like dialogs, book, audio -- it's super concentrated and you really must have discipline.Things I really like about the program are that they don't make you wait until you're exhausted one tense before introducing another - they instead choose to acclimate you to whatever is being used in the situation, which is much more natural and also allows you to sound more natural sooner. I also like how they say each phrase both slow and fast, how they include variations on the ways the subject of the lesson is used, and how each phrase is translated both figuratively and literally so you can get a better sense of its meaning plus its actual structure in Spanish. I'm not able to do the hour daily practice I want to, but I can also see how, if one did, a person would achieve double what they would in most other, less intense, programs. You are really getting your money's worth.The only reason for less than five stars is the book's layout could be improved. Also, the amount of new vocabulary is pretty over-whelming. Fortunately, a generous student has created a memrise deck for most of this course, which helps immensely.

Spent a year with this product, went over it a few times using different techniques. Excellent audio and book, and in my opinion best in the market for self study. Worth the investment.

Solid book which doesn't fall apart, good audio quality, brain friendly method Assimil is known for.

Still learning but very useful

I would highly recommend this. This Assimil course is great if you want to learn Spanish

I'm a fan of the Assimil courses. This one is no exception. Very good way to get into learning different languages.