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There are plenty of language self learning programs on the market these days. Some are quite expensive and some seem like a reasonable price but surely the ultimate judge of value for money is whether the product has managed to teach you to speak Spanish. Can you learn to speak Spanish from just a book and/or a CD or MP3 ? Well, kind of. This article will cover the advantages and disadvantages of using an audio language course to learn Spanish. A definite advantage of an audio course is that it is a good simulation of the method we used to learn our native language. As a baby you learn your native language by listening and eventually repeating what you hear. This is the same method that is used with a Spanish CD or MP3. The words and phrases are listened to and repeated. There is a dialog that you take part in much like the dialog a baby has with it's mother. This is in sharp contrast to more traditional methods that require students to learn reading, writing and grammar at the same time. This is not an intuitive model as most kids learn these skills after they are fluent speakers. This teaching method works for some people but many get overwhelmed by the huge amount of knowledge and learning they have to take in and simply lose interest. Secondly, learning from an audio CD can help your pronunciation. In many ways pronunciation is more important than grammar when you first start learning a language. If you want to speak to people to practice what you have learned (and you should), they will forgive your grammatical mistakes and get the meaning of your words. However if your pronunciation is bad they will simply not understand you no matter how sympathetic they are to you. This can really dent your confidence when first starting out. Believe me, talking to Spanish speaking people is the key to improving your skills so you don't want to shy away from this because of poor pronunciation or a bruised ego. Lastly, a great benefit of a learn Spanish CD or MP3 is that it is easy to use. The classic example of this is listening to the course as you drive to work each morning. You could also listen to it in the gym or when cooking a meal. To some extent this is true. However, in my experience you can't devote your full attention to more than one thing, especially when it comes to a new language. Michel Thomas has many audio only courses and he advises (in the introduction to the courses) that you don't do anything else but listen to the audio. I tend to agree with him, especially on the first few listens. However, if you have listened to the course often then it gets easier to multi task but to begin with it is tough and you would probably save as much time just doing one thing at a time. So can you learn Spanish from a CD or MP3 ? I think they can give you a grasp of the language but you have to learn a lot more before you will be considered fluent. Being fluent requires a fair degree of confidence too. And you can only have this confidence if you use the language regularly and have made a few mistakes along the way. Even so an audio course is a good starting point and is convenient for many people that have busy lives.
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