Learn Spanish with Paul Noble for Beginners – Complete Course: Spanish made easy with your bestselling personal language coach Audio CD – Unabridged, 13 Sept. 2012

I thinks it is difficult to rate a language course, but I have rated this one at 5 stars simply because I have enjoyed doing it and it has met my requirements at this time. Over thirty years ago I studied French for about 5 years at school to scrape an ‘O’ level (GCSE) pass which I have attempted to use on a handful of French holidays since then. Since school I have not attempted to learn Spanish (or any other language). I chose this course because I liked the idea of a focus on spoken Spanish, and I was intrigued by the suggestion of a different approach to language learning.The way I used this course was to listen to a few sections each day when out walking. Since I am out and about in uncrowded areas, I could easily say all the material out loud, with only the slight risk that someone who knows Spanish might hear me and wonder why I am loudly announcing ‘a kilo of mangoes’ to no one in particular. Although the course suggests not trying to learn the material and not to worry about getting it wrong, I found that listening to each section a few times worked best for me (e.g., Listening to sections 3-6 one day then 5-8 the next day etc). Since the course has a lot of repetition and revision sections, this may not have been necessary, but it seemed to suit me. (Looking at the music player statistics afterwards it looks like I listened to each section an average of 3 times with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 7). There are pauses provided in the material for you to say a response. Sometimes I struggled to find a response in that time and very occasionally it seemed that just not enough time was provided for a response even if you knew what to say. The instructions suggest pausing the playback to give yourself time, but this was just not practical for me to do and I did not do this. The course does just seem to jump straight in at the start and to jump about a lot, and there is very little reference to any grammatical terms, tenses etc, but surprisingly for me it did seem to build in an understandable way. I normally like things to be very logical and structured (I naturally like to see tables of information etc) but I enjoyed this approach. It did not always seem that logical (you cover yes in one section and no in a totally different one, you cover Spanish for ‘this evening’ and ‘this afternoon’ but not ‘this morning’ etc) but overall, it does seem to follow a natural progression. As other reviewers have commented it is highly repetitive, but that is what helped me to remember things. There is a limited set of vocabulary used, but the course contents do provide basics that will help in several common situations such as booking a room in a hotel, restaurants, doctors, asking directions and decorating a house(!). Whilst I do not think that there is huge breadth to the vocabulary used in the course, I do feel that it has provided me with a tool kit that I hope will help in many situations in Spain and will give me greater confidence in understanding and being understood. I will be looking at additional courses (including the Paul Noble follow-on course) to continue my study, but I do feel that this has been a great start (but yet to be proven by actually speaking Spanish to a Spanish person!). Note that the course does cover Castilian and Latin American Spanish with most phrases spoken in both. As advised, I focussed on just one of these, but I am not sure of the value of having both in the same course. The course comes with a very thin booklet, which as advised I have hardly looked at before completing the course, but I am looking at it now to try to link back the pronunciations that I have learnt with the written words.

I've been trying to learn Spanish off and on for the last 5 years and have tried quite a few options, but this is by far the most effective yet. I've always considered myself to be very poor at languages, and really struggled at school, spending 9 years learning French and hardly being able to speak a word! To learn Spanish, first I tried with the Pimsleur Course, which I failed to finish: it's very good, but doesn't get you into the language nearly as quickly, and the words and phrases aren't as immediately useful. Ultimately it seems like it would be more comprehensive, but it's also entirely South American Spanish rather than Spanish Spanish, which left my Spanish wife giggling at some of the words I came out with. Next I tried Michel Thomas: quite different to Pimsleur and a much more effective approach. However I did find it a bit tedious after a while, and somewhere along the way I seemed to get lost. I got about half way through and then my enthusiasm fizzled out. Finally I discovered Paul Noble's course - it caught my eye as I'd seen him on TV sometime speaking in about a dozen different languages so I figured it's worth a go. I'm really happy that I did. The approach takes some cues from the Michel Thomas one, but a lot more effective and way, way more logical. I was very quickly more confident and on my trip to Spain this month was finally able to hold a reasonable conversation. I think that with the other courses I always felt like I was trying to remember phrases, but after this one I was able to just make things up. I'm really happy with the purchase - I've found other language courses I've tried have been very expensive and ultimately I've questioned the value as I've never finished them. With this one I really feel that I've found a great course for a reasonable price and am very happy. Muchas gracias Paul! Eres un buen profesor!