What is the Best Spanish Learning Program?

or

How to tell apart a good Spanish learning program from a bad one?

Let’s make an instant analogy.

 
Do you know the difference between a good dealer and a bad dealer?

The bad dealer shows you the product and wants you to buy it. He does not offer the product as a solution to any of your problems. He offers the product because he needs your money.

He doesn’t care about your need and problems, and all he wants to tell you is: “Buy this one! You decide whether you need it or not, I don’t care.

If you don’t need it, then go away, someone else would buy it”. All that the bad dealer is interested in is the sale itself, and your money.

The good dealer presents you the product but he already knows about your problem, that’s why he offers a solution for it. He does care about you, and you see that.

He will tell you how his product is going to solve your problem in the best possible way because he’s really interested about your problem and how to help you.

Of course, the good dealer needs you money too – otherwise he would not be selling this product.

Above all however, he thinks about you and your needs, and that is obvious from his attitude.

For this reason, you decide to buy the product from the good dealer, and not from the bad one. The bad dealer doesn’t care about you – so why you should care about him?

Yes, that’s what the Spanish learning programs do – they sell Spanish to you. It’s you who are about to decide which dealer you would choose.

This task is not so difficult, and once you learn the most essential, you’ll be able to make your best decision, so that you start talking Spanish as fast and easy as possible.

• The bad program just shows you what you have to learn. It doesn’t care that the amount of all the material would bring you into disappointment and despair.
   
•  The good program shows you what you have to learn but in such a way that you are not aware of it. What is more, the right program would reveal how to learn all that. 
  
• The bad program could give your up your wish to learn Spanish.
   
• The good program might help you get even more motivated by showing the language to you in an interesting and attractive way.
   
• The bad program doesn’t provide you with enough or any recordings to listen. Eventually you will not only have problems with listening and comprehension, but you might have memorized some words with a pronunciation.
   
• The good program provides you with an abundance of listening material, thus bringing you closest to real life situations and takes good care of your pronunciation as well. 
  
• The bad program does not provide you with enough or any exercises in Spanish but only gives you explanations instead, so that you might either get lost or get a headache after 15 minutes of work!
   
• The good program contains lots of practical exercises that will prepare you in the best possible way to apply Spanish in real after your study is over.
  
• The bad program does not suggest any way to memorize. You’ve got to invent a method yourself.
   
• The good program uses a memorizing approach, so that you are not aware of it, yet you can perfectly cope with all the learnt vocabulary.
   
• The bad program pours down all the grammar over your head and neither tells you how to learn, nor recommend an easy way to learn. But what is the most important – you don’t see the need of all this grammar stuff as you don’t see where it is exactly placed. 
  
•  The good program teaches you grammar implicitly, you are not aware of it, yet you can successfully apply all the grammar rules in practice.
   
• The bad program is composed indifferently, like a reference tool. Often bad programs are a simple “copy-paste” really from some reference tools – Spanish phrase-books and Spanish grammar books. A reference tool cannot be your guiding light to Spanish, it’s indifferent to you – just like the bad dealer. Then why should you care?
   
• The good program cares about your problem – to learn to talk in Spanish as fast and easy as possible. It’s not a cold reference tool, it will take you on a long journey to reveal the Spanish world to you. The good program would give answers to all your questions, and will not only be your teacher, but also your friend.
   
• The bad program starts somewhere and leads you nowhere. It gets you to a point where you feel confused. You appear to have learnt a lot but you know few. What is you’re your Spanish is unusable and too far from even a fair level. You have lost all your time, and for what? To be in a situation where you don’t know how to move on, yet you feel pointless to turn round and take the way back.
   
• The good program gets you to a point where you clearly know what you’ve learnt and what is still ahead of you. Thus you can make the right decision – to go on with the next level course or to resume on your own, in both cases being aware what you win and what you lose. 

Your language learning program is your window to Spanish speaking world. You’ve got to discover it.

As you noticed, I said “good” and “bad”, not “right” and “wrong” program. This is because even the program is “good”, it might be the wrong one for you if it doesn’t match your targets and intentions.

Whether a good program is right or wrong for you depends not only on what you are going to use Spanish for, but also on your personality and learning style.

Very often people easily make a wrong step which eventually might lead to failure. They get bored, disappointed, angry, frustrated – such a person is always easy to give up any undertaking.

It’s the same to stop reading books after you have come upon a couple of books you did not like. Or stop watching movies due to the same reason.

The solution is – you’ve got to search while in clear what you need and what you don’t need.