"Spanish Sentence Magic" Not Merely Optional

If you could sum up Spanish Sentence Magic in three words, what would they be?

Spanish Sentence Magic is required listening for anyone who wants to learn Spanish fast. (I think that's more than 3 words. Sorry.)

Any additional comments?

I think that Spanish Sentence Magic should be REQUIRED LISTENING in every high school or college level one and level two Spanish class.

Here's an English example of how this great Spanish sentence building program would work if you were learning English: It teaches you / It teaches you to speak / It teaches you to speak and understand / It teaches you to speak and understand Spanish. Language Audiobooks does it in increments. In easy-to-understand building blocks that you can customize yourself for original communication in Spanish.

There is a very clear explanation of what is coming up right at the beginning. Immediately you start to make short but complete original sentences that cover dozens of topics: eating, sleeping, wanting, liking, doing, going, and so forth. Building on these simple, concise sentences (I want to eat, I want to go, I want to order, I want to do, and so on) the teachers then lengthen them: I want to speak with you; I want to do it now/right now/later; I want to see/I want to see something new; I would like to eat/I would like to eat something else. With simple nouns and verbs as your sentence foundation you are taught to add words and phrases so that you can say longer and more sophisticated sentences. Your own sentences. The words are phrases that you learn all apply to a wide variety of real life conversation situations.

Language Audiobooks also puts out a program called POWER SPANISH CONVERSATION – INTENSIVE. The INTENSIVE program is a perfect follow-up to this Spanish Sentence Magic program. I was a little afraid that the INTENSIVE program might be too much for me, but Spanish Sentence Magic prepared me well enough to be able to handle the INTENSIVE program pretty well. Feel free to read my review of the POWER SPANISH CONVERSATION - INTENSIVE audio program. In the meantime, if you are not already at a strong intermediate or at an advanced level you should get this Spanish Sentence Magic program right away.

28 people found this helpful

Clear, Systematic, Easy & Creative

Any additional comments?

Fabulous program that taught me how to create very simple Spanish sentences right away.
Mark (this guy is a master teacher who actually created all the language programs for Macmillan Audio of NYC and his native Spanish speaking assistants guide you though all of this so that you're speaking your own sentences in Spanish right away.

Please remember that I have tried virtually every approach and nobody else has anything close to this. This stuff is great and super cheap. Eat your heart out Paul Noble.
I especially loved the Audio Snapshots because they give you a clear heads up of the material that's going to be covered later on and kicks off a memory technique that helps you retain what you've learned..

And no guessing. English right away so you're not left scratching your head.

And the native accents are from Mexico and all over South America.

5 people found this helpful

highly recommended

Highly recommended. Great way to practice and brush up on Spanish before traveling. Best to have some foundation first though.

4 people found this helpful

great book

very logical and ready to follow, I am going to listen to this book many more times

2 people found this helpful

Uneven but upbeat

Having just completed and enjoyed Paul Noble's three courses, I was looking for something that addressed actual grammatical sentence structure rules such as placement of the object pronoun before the verb, and reflexive verbs. While Sentence Magic gives a simple method for building present tense sentences, it didn't deliver on my objectives - at least not in the two-thirds that I could stand to get through. While the course was certainly cheerful and upbeat, which was nice, I don't think that after the first five minutes there's a bit of original material in here. It seems to be cut and pasted from his numerous other courses, and as a result the timing is uneven and the structure contradictory.

This course does not include a transcript. However, if you go to the Accelerated Spanish courses, you can download their transcripts, and it's easy to see where sections have been lifted verbatim. The second problem this causes is that, for instance, the narrator discusses "usted" for a couple minutes, ending with the comment that its use would be very rare in the course; but then the entire next lesson is repeating verbs with and without "usted"; in other words, the course flow contradicts itself in spots because the segments appear to have been cut and pasted from other courses. Third, there are several instances where a new word is taught by repeating it several times after "the native speaker" (couldn't they give her a name?), and then the next thing the narrator asks is if we can recall from memory what that word is. Geez, I just repeated it a half-dozen times; my memory isn't that bad! And other times, the narrator asks us to recall a word from memory, but that word was not yet taught. Finally, the timing between the narrator and "the native speaker" is frequently off; we're told to answer his question before "the native speaker", but "the native speaker" answers almost immediately; or we're asked to create a relatively complex, for beginners, sentence, but "the native speaker" doesn't give us enough time before answering, and I'm not that slow.

Yesterday I got to one of the "snapshots" which was about ten minutes of listening to the narrator say a word in English and "the native speaker" state the word or phrase in Spanish. We are not supposed to try to repeat the words, just listen (after which we get a "You did a great job listening!" - huh?) It went on and on and on. No involvement, and far too many words to be expected to recall later. At that point, I went off in search of a different course.

Finally, every single Spanish language book I have and every audio course I'd listened to tells us to pronounce a "v" as a "b". In this course "the native speaker" is quite distinctly using the "v" sound. Maybe there's some regional difference I'm not aware of, but if so it's not explained here.

However, I will say that "the native speaker" is very clear in her pronunciations, and I did like the way in which she would repeat a word or phrase slowly the first time, and then say it in a normal conversational pace (i.e. running the words together) as we can expect to find in conversation with other native speakers.

7 people found this helpful

Excellent material to learn Spanish Language with

Where does Spanish Sentence Magic rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The Best so far.

Who was your favorite character and why?

No Characters

What about Mark Frobose’s performance did you like?

His way of teaching.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

No Comment

Any additional comments?

I would recommend this to anyone at the beginning stage of learning Spanish. Excellent!

4 people found this helpful

Mi encanta sure libro

I am thoroughly enjoying this series. Looking forward to downloading more audio books from this series

wonderful book, excellent performance!

this book has really helped in my Spanish journey. I highlyrecommend it to you all.