Complete Spanish Step-by-Step

De: Barbara Bregstein

Narrado por: Rachel Story

Complete Spanish Step-by-Step is a top-selling Spanish book on all of Amazon! With more than 1,000 four- and five-star reviews, the reviews speak for themselves. Now, it’s your turn to learn Spanish with us! This audio course is designed to help you learn Spanish as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.

Note: Complete Spanish Step-by-Step includes Easy Spanish Step-by-Step as its first 15 chapters. The subsequent chapters, 16-30, provide a deeper dive into learning Spanish.

No one wants to spend effort and hours learning a language, and still not truly, authentically, be able to speak it. Well—no se preocupe (“don’t worry”)—with years of experience and thousands of success stories, we’ve got you covered! No matter your reason, once you’ve committed yourself to learning this beautiful language, you want to be sure you do it right. Right?

Here’s what you can expect from your Easy Spanish Step-by-Step course:

• Be ready to listen and speak—a lot! This is the way that each and every one of us learned our first language, and the number one way that our brain actually learns and remembers information. You will be speaking Spanish out loud within your first few minutes with us.
• Learn correct grammar and be able to apply it to your communication. This audio course is the product of a fusion of two methods: comprehensive grammatical understanding blended with authentic, child-like acquisition through listening and speaking.
• Actively engage in your learning with dynamic practice activities! This course is not a podcast or a lecture to simply listen to. You are going to be interacting with us the entire time: responding to questions, filling in the missing word, giving your opinions, and more.
• Tune your ‘Spanish ear’ to an authentic, native Spanish-speaker accent. Your new Spanish teacher, Rachel, is accompanied by Jorge, a native Spanish speaker. Adapt your listening skills to the “real” Spanish you will hear out in the community and across the world—not only the slow, clearly-enunciated Spanish you would hear in a classroom setting.
• Make meaningful connections between newly introduced words and concepts and your own life, further increasing your brain’s ability to remember them thanks to the personal connection.
• Develop your skills through a natural mix of language structure and fluid, conversational-style listening.
• Listen to original stories and poems in Spanish and demonstrate understanding through interactive questions.
• Receive consistent encouragement to recognize your growth, and to always take the course at your own pace.

Easy Spanish Step-by-Step is designed in such a way that each section builds upon the last to help your brain progressively create lasting and meaningful connections to each new word and grammar concept. Simply by listening and speaking out loud with us, you will naturally progress, step-by-step, toward Spanish communication and fluency.

©2020 McGraw Hill (P)2021 Upfront Books

A great concept, ruined by the implementation

I was loving this series for about the first 5 hours. It's unique among my Spanish audiobooks in covering ALL of the grammar, and the exceptions to and variations on the grammar. For instance, it has a very useful section on irregular verbs which breaks them down into a small number of groups, each with its own pattern. It really is COMPLETE.

BUT. It is so SLOW, because the way it chooses to tell you the Spanish and the English version of a phrase is stupid.

There are only 2 good ways to sequence the Spanish and English versions of a phrase: Either speak the Spanish version and then the English, or the English and then the Spanish. What this series usually does is, Speak the Spanish version twice in a row, with one or two words omitted. Then speak the omitted Spanish word. Then speak the English version with the English equivalent of the omitted words inserted.

This is terrible because you're trying to understand a Spanish sentence with one or two missing words, while having no knowledge about what the missing words are, and most of the words in the sentence are unfamiliar. To make it worse, the speaker makes a pause for each missing word that is at least as long as the pause between repetitions of the sentence, AND you don't know in advance whether one or two words will be missing. So you can't tell whether a pause is because a word is missing, or because the speaker is about to repeat the sentence.

To make it worse, Spanish is spoken with no pauses between words in a sentence, with the last consonant of many words clipped off; acoustically, it's a steady stream of sound. The speakers make no attempt to clarify the word boundaries. I realize that it's important to hear sentences spoken as a native would speak them, but IMHO that should be done later, after learning the words and their meanings.

To make it worse, you'll have been told the meaning of a Spanish word spoken by the female speaker, and then expected to recognize it when spoken by the male speaker. But they speak slightly different dialects, so for instance the female speaker pronounces the letters B and V as 'V', while the male speaker pronounces both as 'B'. The female speaker enunciates the final consonant of each word; the male speaker often does not. There are so many differences in how they pronounce each word that the word you are supposed to recognize sometimes sounds, to an English speaker, like a completely different word when spoken by the male speaker.

To make it worse, most of the sentences are much too long for beginning Spanish speakers. They're 10 to 20 words long when they should be 3 to 8.

So in practice, when listening to this series, every time I listen to a phrase in Spanish and English, I have to listen to the whole long tedious sequence at least 3 times before I can even tell what words are being spoken.

To make it worse, the pauses for omitted words, and between repetitions, or between Spanish and English, are absurdly long. Like 4 times as long as they need to be.

To make it worse, they often begin a section with a complete story, 100 to 200 words long, containing ALL OF THE WORDS YOU HAVEN"T BEEN TOLD THE MEANINGS OF YET. I can't even pick out the words before I've heard them on their own, because, as I mentioned, Spanish speakers don't separate words acoustically. Those long passages are a complete waste of time.

So, while the material chosen to present is well-chosen and very thorough, the manner of presentation requires me to spend literally about 20 times as long as necessary listening to each sentence just to figure out where the sentence and word boundaries are, what words are being said, and which words of the speaker map to the same word spoken by the other speaker. I think this lesson series was developed very carefully, and then not tested on people who don't know Spanish.

Well-paced learning

I really like the way this is organized and paced. Rachel has an easy and logical way of introducing vocabulary and grammar. The helper, Juan is sometimes hard to understand. He has a Cuban accent and I understand the need for different accents, but he's just hard to understand sometimes, like his speech is muddled. However, it doesn't detract too much from the overall learning experience. This would get 5 stars if it included a PDF to help lend clarity to vocabulary and pronunciation.

Highly Recommended for Spanish Learners with Busy Schedules!

The audio version of this book is perfect for individuals interested in learning Spanish on-the-go! I purchased the paperback copy of the workbook years ago but only completed about 80% of it before I got too busy. Now, not only has this audiobook been a more convenient learning resource but has also helped me break through some of the language plateaus I’ve dealt with over the past years. As far as the audio quality goes there was some skipping and muffled speech. Overall, any audio issues I came across were very minor in comparison to the amount of return I got from the lessons.

Drawbacks: I didn’t learn as much new vocabulary as I would have liked.
It’s something to be aware of although this is a solid grammar book at its core. The audiobook covers a lot of content so I recommend actively listening to it. As the grammar lessons increased in complexity, I found it useful to take notes or list out new grammar concepts and vocabulary in a flashcard app.

Excellente!

I'm just beginning my Spanish journey and this audiobook is perfect. The content is great so far and Rachel Story's performance is stellar. Her voice is very pleasant and make listening a very enjoyable experience.

Audio is messed up in Chapter 8

Love the voice of the English narrator and Spanish speaker. They are so easy to understand. The layout of the chapters and content makes it easy to build on what you learn. Unfortunately, there are some audio editing errors. Chapter 8 has repeated or skipped words. Very distracting and frustrating.

Parts are missing from the chapters

I love it but the further I get into the chapters the worse the audio is. There will be parts that are missing or that were cut off or repeat a few times due to bad editing.

Very well organized

This is the best Spanish language learning book. Grammar rules explained clearly with chapters clearly identifying. different grammar focus. It is my go to book for learning and review.

Post Production Fail but Great Audio Course.

I have listened to all of the audiobook up to but not including chapter 7. I also have read and finished the physical book (all 30 chapters) before I picked this title up. I love the physical book but this audio book, so far, has missed the mark.

My first gripe was that the production team lost the opportunity to break the navigation of the chapters up further among its respective smaller sections. So, you will have to manage your own stopping points, as opposed to having the opportunity to learn different subsections in chunks. For example, almost each section of the audio book is an entire chapter and is 2 hours long. This does not do a "audio" language learning program justice. Even if you want to use bookmarks, there is no real indication in the audio chapters that show when one subsection ends and other begins. And easy temporary fix for this can be to upload a pdf that shows the time stamps.

My second gripe, though it's a bit small, is that the audio muffles from time to time.

My third gripe is that the Hispanic author is very monotone. He puts no “life” into the readings. No expressions. No excitement. Nada. This could be a time to shine, but he does not. He just…reads.
BUT, then I got to the practice section right before chapter 7 and realized that the production team totally missed the mark. This practice section is not in alignment with the book or what has been taught on the audio program up this point. It appears that both the practice questions for Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 were merged into this practice section, although the material in Chapter 7 has not yet been covered up to this point. I can see many people who only try to use this audiobook as a teaching tool drop off during this section. I'm confident it's a post-production mistake because the narrator says things such as, "now that we have covered 'por' and 'para', or 'now that you know how to conjugate 'ir', which are both cover in Chapter 7. Furthermore, this practice section covers "Idioms using Tener". Again, this material isn't covered until Chapter 7.

Edit: In chapter 8, the track skips many times, like it’s an old school CD. It is distracting and actually makes you miss a few teaching points. Shameful.

So, what do you do?
If you've gone through the physical book and are only using this audio as a supplement to your studies, you can keep going because you should be fine with the miss. You'll still understand everything taught. This is what I will do.

If this is your first time through the audiobook, be sure to listen to Chapter 7 before doing the practice section that begins directly after Chapter 6. Once you return to the practice section you should be fine understanding all the material.

Conclusion
I'm confident I'm going to find many more errors because the audio program is a massive 59 hours! I get that it may have been hard to catch this but somebody got paid to mess this up and it may cost the author royalties if enough people fall off or never recommend this product. But, despite the post production fail, I think this is still a great supplement to the physical book and still highly recommend it an addition for your self-paced learning program.

Thanks for the Very long course

I really appreciate those who created this course. It must have taken a Long time and a lot of hard work and dedication-to-task. I learned more in this course, about grammar mostly, than I have been able to find in other “complete” courses. The readers were sweet and gentle. Thank you so much!

Satisfecho

Dear audiobook reader,
This material seems the best among many other languages sources available. I’ve tried many to quickly learn Spanish and end up this long course, so far having repeated five times, spending almost 300 hours. Now I could speak Spanish in public place. Thanks to Babara y Rachel!!!