Best Online Spanish Course.

Learning Spanish, Where To Start?

This is a comparison of two of the webs best selling Spanish Learning courses:
The ever popular Rocket Spanish and...
The revamped Learning Spanish Like Crazy

But before I go into the specifics of each course, you need to first understand what you want to achieve from learning Spanish, do you want to become fluent in written and spoken Spanish or get a quick crash course in conversational Spanish for when you next go on vacation?

Before starting my investigations I made a short list of key features that I felt to be important with a language course:

1) Current, up-to-date material - no point using a course that was 5, 10 or 20 years out of date. You may laugh but I have found Spanish language course tapes for sale in my local book shop that were dated 1989! If you going to learn a language
then you should be using material that is as contemporary as possible.

2) Quick and Easy to Learn - I want a course that is presented in a way that is in "tune" with the way I learn. I was looking for something that would give me a conversational level of Spanish and be able to teach me the basics quickly.

3) Digital Media Format - I want the option to be able to use the course any where I chose, that is, to be able to put the audio onto my iPod for when I'm out-and-about. I also wanted to have access to it when I was at work or at home without having to carrying about cassettes/cds, manuals or printouts.

4) Proven results - I wanted something that works and that people are getting results from.

How I found the best course for my needs:

Let me state again, you want to find a course that best suits you, your learning style and that meets your key learning objectives.

The language course I chose in the end was one that best suited me, when you are looking at various course keep in mind what you want to get out of it.

Following my own criteria listed above, I realized that I would have to buy something from the Internet as everything that I found "off-line" i.e. down the shops, was either out-dated, too cheap or over priced or wrong media.

After a good Googling, I found some courses that looked like what I was looking for I then short listed them down to a couple that looked to be good contenders;
Rocket Spanish and Learning Spanish Like Crazy, both around the same
price, (around $99). Both claim to be easy and be able to teach you Spanish "Fast".

Next thing I did was to sign-up to their email courses to see what they can offer. Surprisingly the two e-courses from Rocket Spanish and Learning Spanish Like Crazy are like chalk and cheese.

The Learning Spanish Like Crazy example comes as a series of emails. The fist email gives you instructions to go to their website (the link is in the email) and down load a PDF and an MP3 file (which is very large 32mb).

I personally found both the content of the PDF and the MP3 recording quite confusing, it seemed to be jumping straight into a specific word and how it means two different things depending on how you say it.

Now, don't get me wrong, knowing the difference between "potato" and "dad" maybe important but if your going on a business trip or holiday you don't need to know that straight away. At this point I gave up listening.

After reading their web site and looking at their example lesson, my impression of Learning Spanish Like Crazy was that it is aimed more at the academic student wanting to learn precisely the nuances of Spanish, the recording sounded old and you have to read the PDF in conjunction with listening to the MP3 audio and it was very repetitive.

All in all, Learning Spanish Like Crazy comes across as a ridged, formal and class room orientated Spanish course, one in which you are going to slowly and methodically learn Spanish. Defiantly notmy cup-of-tea!

Moving on. Rocket Spanish, on the other hand, had a different approach. The fist example lesson emailed to me gave a link to a web page where you get the lesson, this time though you don't have any PDF to download(you do get written examples, more of proper mini-course in later emails) but you do have two options to listen to their audio. You can either listen via streaming audio or download a MP3.

I'm not sure it was my PC or their website but I had some problems with the streaming audio and could only get it to work by hovering the mouse pointer over the play button. The MP3 download was much smaller than the Learning Spanish Like Crazy one as it was only 7.26MB, which worked out to be about 16 minuets worth of audio and the audio quality was excellent.

Rocket Spanish's approach is to dive straight into conversational Spanish, much better for those of us who wish to be able to start to speak Spanish and not worry about saying "potato" and "dad". Their format is to split a lesson up into two, fist sending you to the audio and then the nest lesson sending you to a text lesson, so that their six part mini-course is in fact three lessons split in to two. First an Audio lesson then text lesson.

This format works very well for me and the text lessons are very easy to read as they are web based (you can print them off if you wish) and complement the audio lesson perfectly.

The three main subject lessons they covered in the six-part mini email course were, Greetings in Spanish, Introducing Yourself in Spanish and Getting What You Want. More than enough to get you started.

CONCLUSION:

Let me get to the point, go get Rocket Spanish for the pure reason that it's just so good. You will find Rocket Spanish as just about the perfect course for you, it gives you both a fast path to learning Spanish, it has quality audio lessons that can be used by themselves (just right to burn to CD, upload to your mp3 player or just play it on your computer) and when you are ready you can expand your learning just follow the text lessons.

But if you are looking for a more formal Spanish learning course then Learning Spanish Like Crazy could be for you, it's much more involved and probably will give the serious student more depth of Spanish than Rocket Spanish.

Rocket Spanish and Click Here Learning Spanish Like Crazy

Adiós Amigos!