Product Description

Playing My Spanish Coach for 15 to 20 minutes a day is all you need to become fluent in Spanish, no matter your age. The simple touch screen interface lets you spend less time learning the game and more time learning Spanish. The game includes 8 touchpad mini-games to sharpen your skills at your own pace, and lets you track your progress with charts showing your performance learning the language. ESRB Rated E for Everyone.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #249 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: UBI Soft
• Model: 16391
• Released on: 2007-11-06
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Dimensions: 2.00 pounds

Features

• Adapted to any level, from beginner to advanced
• Get regular evaluation on improvement
• Learn Spanish through mini-games and competition
• Write your answers with the stylus on the Touch Screen
• Translator and glossary

Amazon.com

Playing My Spanish Coach for 15 to 20 minutes a day is all you need to become fluent in Spanish. This title teaches the basics of word, use, grammar and construction of phrases through minigames and evaluates your progress. There are 1000 interactive lessons designed with Spanish teachers, 10,000 words and 400 phrases, including pronunciation tests using the built-in DS microphone. An added feature of the game is the ability to look up words or phrases in English or Spanish by list, keyword, categories or by your favorites.

Features:

• 8 touchpad mini-games to sharpen your mastery of the language at your own pace
• Track your progress with charts showing your performance learning the language
• Simple touch screen interface

Customer Reviews

Great Learning Device
I really love this game. Each lesson has ten words to be mastered. There are great games for helping you master these words. In addition you hear the native speaker and you can also record your voice to compare your pronunciation and even hear the native speaker and your pronunciation simultaneously.

With the multiple choice games, you can choose not to look at the multiple choices and see if you can come up with the word in your head first. I always choose easy rather than hard since it gives you more time to come up with the word first and pronounce it before looking at the choices and choosing the word. There are even sentence building games that help with learning sentence structure.

It teaches a little bit of grammar though I would have liked more. At the half way point (which is where I am at), somewhere around lesson 38, they stopped with grammar tips and had only one game for mastering the words instead of two. I was a bit disappointed at that but am hoping that in later lessons they will again give grammar pointers. Even so I give the program five stars because of all it does for the price and the fact that you can use it anywhere instead of being tied to a computer. I definitely recommend it.

Good if you need a refresher, but only until lesson 38!
If you do not know Spanish, do not get this game! It is useful as a supplement to a beginning Spanish course, but by itself it will not help you learn the language correctly.

I was very impressed by the first lessons - I tested into lesson 22 and I was pleased by the structure of the lessons...until I got to lesson 38. There it goes from lovely structure to random choices of 10 words. These words come from all over the dictionary, and the fact that they are not even remotely related makes them harder to remember. Also, at this point, the game stops introducing new sentences.

PROS:
- The first 38 lessons (of 1000) are nice!
- The games are very useful for memorization.
- The ability to record your own voice and compare to the Spanish pronunciation is fabulous for working on your accent.

CONS:
- The "random word" lessons are tiresome.
- The definitions are not 100% accurate.
- Sentence-making stops after lesson 38.


If you are using this to expand your vocabulary, this can be a useful tool. This game will not magically teach you Spanish, but it can help.

Decent vocabulary builder, but requires self-discipline
I started the Pimsleur Essential Spanish audio series in June of 2007, and began using My Spanish Coach in tandem with it in March 2008. While My Spanish Coach can't hold a candle to a professional language learning program, it is good for teaching you new words and expanding your vocabulary, not to mention being a whole heck of a lot cheaper than "real" courses. But it's pretty easy to cheat, and you have to have a lot of self-discipline to get the most benefit out of it.

Presented in the form of lessons, games, and reference material, My Spanish Coach tries hard to teach you the language. It starts you off with a quiz to see how much Spanish you know. I initially tested pretty highly, so it threw me into slightly more advanced lessons that assumed I already knew a bunch of words from easier lessons. I didn't, so I erased my data and started again. This time, I deliberately bricked the test so I could start from the beginning.

The lessons present a series of words - about 10 per lesson - that are related to each other in some way. Things like colors, months, seasons, emotions, words a tourist needs to know, directions, etc. The game walks you through a few screens that introduce these words and use them in simple sentences. Then, it's off to the games. Activities like flash cards, word search, sentence builder, fill-in-the-blank, and many others are presented to help reinforce the words in your mind.

As you play these educational games, the program keeps track of your progress. Finish enough games successfully, and you're moved on to the next level.

The presentation of the game is about as lighthearted and fun as you're likely to find in a program that teaches something as complicated as a new language. Your progress is graphically measured by a trail that starts at the United States / Mexico border, and slowly meanders down through Mexico and on into South America. I'm not entirely sure where it goes after that, as I'm only about halfway through Brazil.

The games themselves are fun and creative, but there's a problem - the way they're set up, you can pretty easily guess and bluff your way through the lessons. For example, if you're multiple choice and the word is "winter," your 4 choices may be Junio, tio, anaranjado, and invierno. Now, if you can't remember that invierno is winter, but you know for a fact that Junio is June and tio is uncle and anaranjado is some sort of color (orange), then you can choose the right word by the process of elimination.

Then too, in order to keep the pace up and hold your attention, the game doesn't make you labor over each lesson very long. Once you've earned the requisite number of points to move on, then by golly, you're moving on, and you'll probably not see much more of the words you just learned in the previous lesson, ever again.

I'm not exactly the world's quickest learner, but still, I wonder how much a person can really retain when the words and phrases are presented so quickly. Oftentimes I find myself spending a session simply playing the games over and over again using words from previous lessons, rather than opting to move on to the next lesson. I find this to be a little tedious, but it's really the best way for me to keep the words I've already learned fixed in my mind.

The game also includes a reference dictionary that helps you translate between English and Spanish, either way. It has a feature that allows you to record your own pronunciation of a Spanish word, then compare that to the way the word is supposed to be pronounced. I think I used this once. Hey, I'm tall and white - I doubt a native Spanish speaker will expect me to pronounce everything like I was born and raised in Zihuatanejo. Besides, Pimsleur helps my pronunciation much more effectively.

Overall, this would be a good purchase if you're looking to make like those old Highlights For Children magazines - fun with a purpose. It's doubtful this game alone will make you a great Spanish speaker, no more than eating only Lucky Charms for breakfast every day will keep you healthy. Rather, just like Lucky Charms needs toast, juice, milk, and a multi-vitamin to make it a well-rounded meal, so too does My Spanish Coach need other teaching programs to help you learn to better communicate with our hispanic and latino neighbors.