American Accent Training (Book and Audio CD, 2nd Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)I do agree with the other reviewers that it is an excellent book written by a professional with extensive experience. It comes with 6 CD and almost 200-page book with detailed explanations of intonation patterns and sounds. Additionally, in the appendix Ann Cook discusses in detail what are the typical accents of native speakers of common languages, and what specifically the native speakers of these languages should work on.
The chief difficulty with working with a course like this is that the learner should not only repeat after the speaker, but should also be able to hear his/her own words to make the necessary corrections. If you keep on repeating the same mistake, but do not hear it and cannot correct yourself - what's the point of practicing? My solution is to practice with a computer. I tried a simple sound recorder on a computer as well as a tape recorder, and it did not work - too complicated, invoves too much button pressing. You need a program which plays a phrase, then records you repeating it, then repeats the native speaker, then plays your recording, and does it all over again in a loop until you are satisfied. It turned out that it is not easy to find a program like this; after a long search, I found a shareware program called FollowMe, its trial version can be downloaded from tarsoft's site or shareware servers (perhaps there are other programs like this which I did not come across, I am talking about the learning concept here). For me personally working with a computer and using a program like described above made a tremendous difference, I really feel that I am getting the most from this book. I can hear my mistakes and I feel that I am correcting them.
While with a course like this the price is much less important than the result and productivity of learning, this book (in my opinion) satisfies both, good quality and reasonable price. Recommended.

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The second edition of the highly acclaimed American Accent Training, now on 5 audio CDs, is for foreign-born students and business people working, traveling or studying in the United States and Canada. Through extensive intonation and pronunciation exercises, students learn how to speak with a standard American Accent. At the same time, listening comprehension improves dramatically. Supplementary materials included detailed nationality guides for eight languages (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Korean), access to a comprehensive website, and referral to a qualified telephone analyst for an individual diagnostic speech analysis. Also included are colored markers for written exercises, and a mirror to practice accurate pronunciation.

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Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course Review

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(More customer reviews)Reading is not a bad way to learn a romance language like Spanish. You can start by reading this book. Then you can hammer down what you've learned and build your vocabulary by reading Spanish-language books. (Amazon has numerous dual-language Spanish/English books.) Then you can go to Mexico to get practice speaking and listening.
The authors give thoughtful advice about how to use this book. Included in that advice is the recomendation that you spend eighty to one-hundred twenty hours mastering its contents. This advice proved useful to me. I was growing frustrated at one point. Then I reviewed my log of hours spent learning, and I discovered I was going way too fast. So I slowed down, reviewed carefully, and then I proceeded at a more realistic pace.
One thing. On page 109 there are two columns labeled "Indirect object" and "Direct object". These labels are reversed. You'd be able to figure that out on your own, but now you don't have to. (You're welcome.)
As a companion to this text, I used "Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses." Sometimes I needed a different perpective to understand a particular grammatical point. These two books articulate well. One gives you thoughtful, sophisticated readings and invites you to translate them into English; the other gives you English passages and invites you to translate them into Spanish. Practice makes Perfect goes into more detail on what it covers, but Spanish for Reading covers all the fundamental parts of speach, not just verbs (although of course verbs are eighty to eighty-five percent of learing Spanish).
For your eighty-to-one-hundred-twenty hours you get all the fundamental parts of speach for Spanish, plus about two thousand vocabulary words. The book contains numerous useful and interesting exercises. With the aid of a dictionary, you will be able to read right away after learning this book. When you have built up your vocabulary, you can throw away the dictionary.

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A unique approach to Spanish reading comprehension, Spanish for Reading can be used as a textbook supplement in classrooms or by anybody who is teaching himself Spanish. It begins by demonstrating similarities between words and parts of words in Spanish and English, and proceeds to offer practical instruction that will help readers broaden recognition of words and phrases. Each of the book's fifteen chapters concludes with a reading passage, the first of them quite easy to comprehend, and successive passages increasingly complex and sophisticated. Early passages are simple essays on Spain's and the Spanish-speaking world's language, geography, and culture. Later passages are excerpts from well-known works by world renowned Spanish writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Students who use this volume methodically will ultimately be reading and understanding these passages in their original, unedited Spanish, without need to seek outside help. Short of spending time in Spain or Latin America, here is as good an introduction to Spanish culture as a student will be able to find anywhere. Photos and line drawings.

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