Speak & Learn Spanish at Mac App Store analyse

I regret buying this app. The actual screen is about 10% the size of my computer’s screen. Small box in middle. There may be a way to maximize, but the graphics and interface are poor. I wish I had my money back.

I must state that I am a native bilingual speaker (Sp & E). I was looking for a kid-friendly program to help teach my kids Spanish. I bought and reviewed (but not tested it on my kids) this product on the same day. This program is installed on my MacBook Pro, not IPad. Itd be nice to have options. The menu navigation is simple. You can choose to change an option in the Options to listen to Spanish words first. The default is to hear English first. All words and phrases are in Spanish and English (recorded voices and text). There are a few Spanish misspellings and on a few occasions the audio from vocab and phrases doesnt match 100% of the text but its rare and I think wont detract from the greater learning. For the price, this program offers a lot. There are a variety of situations/scenarios/drawings where the learner is exposed to Spanish: the supermarket, city/map view, house, hospital, family relationships/albums of different ethnic backgrounds, animals, human anatomy, classroom/school, transportation… I believe the claim of over 700+ Spanish words and phrases. The phrases are helpful too: finding locations, ordering food. The program does not focus at all on rules like conjugations, accent marks. It is for learning casual conversational Spanish. I think the emphasis on visual images,text, and vocal examples will appeal to kids and adults alike. When you move the cursor over some items in every picture, the recordings will play the words. Above some pictures are tiny rectangles for you to hear phrases related to pictures; some pictures give you a list of phrases and you click on the phrases while on other pictures the people who say phrases will be highlighted with a yellow circle around their head when you place the cursor over them. Make sure you click on the same head more than once! The creators gave different phrases for each character. The creators of this program animated the characters to show who is talking (moving mouth or heads). This was a thoughtful feature to help show who is saying what (nurse/patient, waiter/customer). Im telling you reader about the details cause there are no instructions but its easy to figure out. The other "half" of the program is Game Mode in which the learner hears and sees a word in Spanish. You are supposed to click on the correct item in the picture. Points are counted, the program tells you via Red light or Green light if you got the term correct. I think kids will find it cool. I like games and I thought it was a cool feature especially for the price. You can play the game on all the different scenarios. By the way, if you have different people on the same computer, the creators allow different User profiles to be created to keep track of scores or progress. You will hear lots of Spanish, see words in Spanish (and English). Learning is not a guarantee of course but I definitely think this program is set up where it can happen. Why not 5 stars? I mentioned misspellings earlier. Also I cant seem to make the window bigger (maximize full screen). Its sort of small. Maybe I missed something. Also the portability to iPad or lack thereof. Why 4 stars? I would rate it 4 1/2 stars if I could [This is my first App Store Review so I dont know if I can] Lots of useful Spanish vocab and phrases, very visual. Clear dictation by speakers, bilingual, GAME MODE, animated, Mexican Spanish (Spanish from Spain has many differences although we can understand each other), $ good price for education

I am not completely satisfied as this is not what I wanted. The review that is posted was a little misleading. I dont speak Spanish and not looking for flashcard type of learning. I want more of application and verbs or nouns and how to put together a sentence. I havent gotten indepth with the app but after a review of a few of the key terms i.e. medical; I hover over the object in the picture and it tells me what the word is in Spanish. I am not very happy but it will give me some practice hearing and then repeating the object/person.