Great learning tool -- easy and effective

This course is excellent, either as an introduction to Spanish or as a way to refresh or sharpen your skills if you are already somewhat familiar with it.

There are three levels, and each level consists of three 60-minute CDs. (You can buy each level separately; but getting the three levels as a set is cheaper than buying them separately.)

Each CD is sub-divided into 10 or 11 small lessons of increasing difficulty. The lessons start with very simple vocabulary, then simple phrases using that vocabulary, then simple sentences in the present tense, then more advanced vocabulary and phrases, and then more complex sentences, including the most common verb tenses and moods (present, past, future, compound tenses (I HAVE GONE), conditional (I WOULD GO), imperative (GO AWAY!), and subjunctive (I DOUBT THAT HE'LL GO.).

The range of subject matter also expands gradually. The first level covers what might be called "survival skills," the topics you need to know right away, like transportation, money, hotel, directions, restaurant, shopping, telling time, the telephone, and numbers. Later lessons include vocabulary and concepts of a more general nature, though "survival skills" are also given additional, more advanced treatment.

All of the CDs follow the same methodology - the target word, phrase, or sentence is given in English, followed by a pause, then the Spanish translation is given, followed by another pause, followed by a repetition of the Spanish translation. I can tell you from personal experience that this constant repetition works very well. Having the CDs playing in your car or on a headset while jogging (my personal favorite!), is a painless but effective way to learn a new language or review a previously learned language.

Each level includes a 50-page booklet that contains a verbatim transcript of each lesson, so if you have trouble understanding a particular word here or there, you can cheat by looking it up in the booklet. (I would never do that! OK, well maybe once or ten times.) Being able to follow along on the transcript was especially helpful in the lessons on the subjunctive, where pronunciation differences were frequently pretty subtle. Also, some grammatical rules are explained in the booklet. I think that feature is very helpful. Knowing what the general rule is can help you see how individual phrases follow a general pattern, which helps the learning process. Putting explanations like that in the booklet, and not on the CD, was another good feature, since you don't want to keep hearing the same lecture on grammar over and over and over again on the CD.

Granted, there's more to Spanish than what can be covered in just nine hours, but this is an excellent intro or refresher course, and has a lot of useful features. (The Learn in Your Car CDs use the Latin American pronunciation, by the way, not the Castilian pronunciation of Spain. If you are going to Spain and specifically want Castilian, then you might prefer the Berlitz or Barron's language tapes and CDs, though I doubt that the difference is all that significant.)

Very Different than it was in School

It's amazing to see the changes that have occurred in the way a foreign language is taught now compared when I was in school so many years ago. I didn't remember much from school, but I remembered just a little about things like sentence structure and a small handfull of words. ==With this course you learn so much more because you listen to the language being spoken rather than spending so much time reading. And my need is not to be able to read the language but to be able to understand it when spoken.

The real key to this course is that it makes very practical use of time otherwise totally wasted on the drive to and from work. It's not exactly painless, you still have to concentrate on listening and speaking. Then a little bit of talking with a native speaker, you will pick up the language far better than you expect.

Good but Behind the Wheel Spanish is Better

I enjoyed using Learn in Your Car Spanish but what I really wanted in my course was to be able to really speak my own mind in the language. Learn in Your Car Spanish gave me lots of vocabulary and useful sentences that you basically memorize, but at no point did I get to learn how to make my own sentences.
I later returned this course for Behind the Wheel Spanish because I wanted to and did later learn how to communicate using my own and not someone else's sentences.