Behind The Wheel Spanish For Your Car / 8 One Hour Audiocassette Tapes / Complete Learning Guide and Tape Script (Cassette) (Behind the Wheel)
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At last a taped Spanish course which requires no reading and which teaches you to actually speak Spanish in a minimum of time and effort. Designed by the experts at Language Dynamics, 'Behind The Wheel Spanish For Your Car' takes the learner form basic to intermediate level Spanish without the guesswork and pain usually associated with language learning. An expert English speaking instructor talks you through these tapes in English while a trained professional native Latin American Spanish speaker teaches you Spanish the way it is really spoken.
Behind The Wheel Spanish For Your Car is the ideal way to learn Spanish while you drive because there is no confusion, no reading, no looking up meanings, and no guessing. It's all on the tapes. Use your commute time to effectively learn Spanish with this delightful course whose method will have you speaking your first words in Spanish within minutes of receiving your course, and enjoying it.
Customer Review: defective
Unfortunately I was unable to actually use this product because the first time I received it I put each cd in to listen to it for a few seconds to make sure they were all correct because I remembered seeing another member review about how they received the wrong one. Sure enough when I put the disc labelled #2 in it was actually #3 (& the disc labelled #3 was #3 too) so I received 2 of #3 & none of #2. I called Amazon & returned the defective set to receive a replacement. When I received the replacement set it had the same exact problem!! I emailed Language Dynamics to inform them of this problem & inquire about them sending me just a single disc #2 (Amazon can not break-up sets) & still have not received a response from them so in the meantime I just returned the product to receive a refund. The operator at Amazon actually told me they were going to pull this product because their inventory must all be defective, hopefully if you try it you will have better luck!!
Customer Review: If you can't decide between BTWS and LIYCS, get both
Here's a comparison of Behind the Wheel Spanish (BTWS) and Learn in Your Car Spanish (LIYCS).
Cocst:
LICYS costs $32.97 and BTWS costs 43.47 as of 5/08.
Packaging:
I give LIYCS 5 stars for contruction. CD's are all pressed like commercially made cds. It comes w/ sturdy cd case, cd of mp3/pdf of booklets (though some of the tracks are 96 kbps rather than 128 kbps), dvd covering some popular tourist areas, and 3 booklets w/ transcript. Booklets pretty convenient to carry and have plenty of space for u to jot down notes. Though it says 9 CD's on the cover, the page actually has 2 extra bonus cd's for a total of 11 cd's. There's one bonus cd for Level 2 and another one for Level 3 that provides more examples.
I give BTWS 1 star for construction. CD's are CD-r's that have been burned and have a white sticker in front which is b/w and printed using a laser printer. Several of the tracks skipped and the first package that I got had CD #8 that didn't have any data on it...it was a blank CD-R. Amazon promptly shipped me a replacement the next day. Included is a book which has like 8 chapters w/ material that are separate from the audio cd. At the end of the book is a few pages in size 6 font that tries to squeeze all the transcriptions from the 8 cd's into a dozen pages. It also has transcriptions from Spanish II and Spanish III courses.
Content:
LIYCS gets 4 stars. It's mostly a traditional tape that covers all the contents of Spanish language. However, I found it boring 2/2 to the repetition. Typical example would be: "We pay in cash"...followed by "Pagamos al contado" twice. No variation in speed. Contrast this with BTWS, where the English narrator would mix things up and ask something unexpected, like: "So learner, how would you say "'We pay in cash?'". LIYCS seems more difficult by the last CD than BTWS. LIYCS also divide each cd until more tracks than BTWS. For example, BTWS has some tracks that are 20 minutes. One good thing about LIYCS is that you could easily go to a certain cd to learn more about preterit because there's a table of contents. On the other hand, the transcription in BTWS doesn't have any table of contents.
BTWS gets 4.5 stars. The packaging sucks, but the content is more entertaining. Easier to stay engaged. However, it's annoying that the english speaker calls you "learner"..lol. "Learner, please.." In terms of content, BTWS seems to cover less material. Maybe that's why they have Level II and III, which are sold separately. I started off w/ 3 cd's from BTWS and then switched to LIYCS cuz LICYS seemed to cover more material. I'll update this section once I get back to BTWS.
Overall:
I'd buy BTWS if i'm a complete novice. Once I'm done w/ that, I'd consider LIYCS to get more vocab or consider BTWS Level II. To be honest, I'd go w/ BTWS since it keeps me more engaged and is more entertaining. They're supposed to come out w/ an updated version in August 2008. Hopefully by then it'll correct the deficiencies and be more professional. In the mean time, since I have both, and I previously had some high school spanish, going through LIYCS is easier cuz I can skip around easily and target the areas that I've forgotten, like preterite, imperfect, etc. You can't go wrong either either product.