Several readers have told me that they have used Visual Link Spanish, and that they liked it. So today I took a look at the website and program. In a nutshell, I was impressed. That link takes you to their site.
When the site loads, you’ll hear the voice of Dave Clark, who taught college-level Spanish. That led to his developing this program, as he explains in the brief video. Just underneath it is a red box offering free Spanish lessons. So of course I clicked on it.A new window opened, with the lesson you see part of below. (I made the image smaller to fit in my blog.)
The red outline draws your attention to the section being taught at the moment. This screenshot only shows part of the screen. A native English speaker says words in English, and then a native Spanish speaker says the words that mean the same thing in Spanish. There is plenty of time for you to repeat the Spanish. Here, the sentence being demonstrated is “I need to go to the park.”
One thing I liked right away was that if I knew what was being said, my eyes could roam over the whole page and I might spot something new to learn. This gave the program a nice flexibility.
As they tell you on the screen, this kind of lesson is called a Listen & Repeat. Roughly 1/5 of the over 500 lessons are this sort. As it tells you, these lessons teach you vocabulary and how to build hundreds of combinations of sentences in 13 major topics.
I went to the next activity, called a virtual instructor, and it was followed by a memory machine. Next came a software tour, and then a video on how it works. This explains that the visual images are linked in your brain to the Spanish words you learn. They have found that words linked to moving images are particularly well retained.
I was fascinated when the video explained the three different learning styles that we humans have, and that each of us has a primary and a secondary style. I had learned this in grad school, and was pleased to see it applied here.
Looks like a good program! There are 11 free lessons. Find out more by clicking on the image:
