Free Trial

by RV
(WI)

I'm using the free 7 day trial of Tell Me More right now. I have the Spanish 10v. online version, I think. I tested at level B1, but that's a joke. I guess well. I'm a beginner all the way. I tried the first B1 activity and the speaker spoke the sentence so fast, that he scared me off! I went back to my beginner lessons. I do have a little knowledge of basic words and phrases and somewhat of an idea how some of the grammar works. I think that helped me in the guessing department. To be fair, perhaps I should have passed on any question for which I was clueless.

I spent an hour and a half on it last night and a good 45 minutes today. I finished 3 lessons. I still have 5 more days to play with this, but here is my first impression: IT is slow.

I have Rosetta Stone, but an older version, which I used for a time, then never went back. (I was almost set to buy their new 4th version after reading glowing reviews, thinking it might keep my interest, until I hit this website and got more unbiased reviews. It caused me to look into other programs.) IT's true, Rosetta teaches you how to say "the boy is under the table", etc, but I felt I was introduced to more vocabulary at the start. Yet, I could not speak except to say things like that, however, it was more colorful and faster moving.

With this program, every question must be answered individually, then push the 'check my answer button' each time, then if you got it correct, you push the 'next activity' button, then the next question comes up. Sometimes there will be 4 questions on a page, but each time you must hit the 'check my answer' button before answering the next question. It also takes a long time for recording your voice. I'm assuming that is so when you have longer sentences to repeat, there is recording time. It also takes awhile for your results to post. It just felt like I was moving so slow and waiting a lot. Then again, maybe that would be a good time to write notes in a notebook, if you are really studious. Maybe I just need to slow down my pace of life? There were times when it was so quiet, I wished I had music in the background. My computer is slow, too, but even the lessons say the est time is anywhere from 45 minutes to over an hour to complete. I felt I had worked on it for over an hour and only covered the alphabet and hello and goodbye.

That's just my first impression. The things I did like, is that you can get the translation, grammar, verb forms, pronounciation, etc at the click of a finger. There are different activities, such as crosswords, spelling, writing, reading, speaking, fill in the blank, click and drop, etc. It worked with the mic built into my computer. It keeps track of where you are, gives you the option to jump ahead, which I won't be doing again :), or reviewing your completed lesson again.

My daughter will graduate in May with a Spanish major. I had her sign up for the free 7 day trial today! I plan to get her 2c on the program before I decide whether or not to purchase it. If they let me, I'll keep you posted! :) Hasta luego!