When I was living in Mexico recently, for about five years, I began using both programs. I slightly favored the Fluenz multimedia course over the Rocket one, but I used to advise people that it really depended on what they wanted. Either course can do a good job of getting you going in basic Spanish. The truly crucial thing is that you actually use whatever you get!

But my opinion has changed a bit recently, and I will tell you why. My husband and I moved back to the United States over half a year ago. (Not because Mexico was getting rougher, though that is true, sadly, but because of family and close friends and community I was missing.)

Anyway, here is why my thoughts have changed. I can’t help but notice how busy everyone is, here in the United States. Many people I know have trouble fitting all the basics in, let alone something they just want to do for fun, like learning Spanish! Seems to me that all our friends are busier than they were five years ago when we left.

So now I would favor Rocket Spanish. Why? Because you can put the heart of its program, the 31 audio files, onto your mp3 player, and then you can listen to them over and over, and take part in the conversations in Spanish, while you are doing other things. I used Rocket Spanish this way in Mexico too, typically when I was walking for exercise.

Because Fluenz is primarily a computer multimedia program, you need to be sitting in front of your computer to use it. Seems like people already do that a lot. In fairness, Fluenz does come with some sound files you can listen to as well, but to me those seem auxiliary. So it is not Rocket Spanish 1, Fluenz Spanish 0… they are both excellent. It’s just about which one you would actually do!

Click on the images in the sidebar to find out more details on either program.

Rocket Spanish vs Fluenz Spanish Revisited is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

That was written a couple of years ago and it still expresses my feelings. In a nutshell, I like it that Fluenz draws on current research on how we learn languages, research that was unknown back when Rosetta Stone was created. I was at fluenz.com the other day and was pleased to see that they are featuring a a comparison of Fluenz Italian and Rosetta Stone Italian, done by an AP writer and on ABCnews.com. Of course, it says Fluenz is better or it wouldn’t be featured there, but it was an interesting article.

If you want to read more about Fluenz, go to my official Fluenz Spanish Review, or see the list of blog articles I have done on Fluenz Spanish.

I just got my copy of Fluenz Spanish back from a friend in Mexico who had borrowed it when we returned to the US. I might have taken another look at it for this article but I had already promised to lend it to a friend who is eager to learn some Spanish to use here in Colorado. Speaking of lending, if you can’t afford it at present, ask you local public library if it can!

Fluenz Spanish Revisited is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

So I was quite interested to read an article about the company, “Fluenz Hopes to Help Users to Fluency,” in the Wall Street Journal recently. It tells about how the company got started and what its goals are. I was a little surprised to read in the article that Fluenz just had its official launch, since I’ve been writing about the Spanish program for over a year, but I guess an official launch is something else.

By the way, I blogged recently that Fluenz Spanish  had gone from having two levels to having three levels. Now it is up to five, which makes it way more useful for moving beyond beginning skills.

In fact, here’s an example of what one could say by the end of Level Five:

“Last year, while I was working in Mexico, my work visa expired. I was very worried, but my friend was able to recommend a good lawyer to me that could help me understand the Mexican labor laws so that I could continue my work.”

That’s quite a mouthful.

I know I could convey that meaning, but I am quite sure a few of my verb endings would fall by the wayside. I didn’t get it quite right one time when I was trying to translate for a Mexican friend this quote from George Burns, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” She got the drift but I didn’t manage to say it as elegantly or correctly as I would have liked!

Here is a link to the new version at Amazon: Fluenz Version F2: Spanish 1+2+3+4+5 (Win/Mac) with software DVDs, audio CDs, podcasts, and Navigator

Interesting Article About Fluenz is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Anyway, here is a list I just found on their website of what you can expect from each level. Here is an Amazon link to the five-level set. There are some really good customer reviews there.

Level 1: Communicating right away

Level 2: Expanding the Range of Time

Level 3: Sharpening the World Around You

Level 4: Speaking naturally

Level 5: Broadening the scope of communication

5 Levels of Fluenz Spanish: What Is In them? is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

These lessons continue to be set in locations a traveler would be likely to be in: hotels, taxis, city streets, shopping malls, restaurants. As before, each lesson has an introduction, a dialogue, an explanation, and a series of exercises to help you really remember the words and the ways they are put together.

In later lessons, you do a lot with numbers. Your Fluenz tutor, Sonia Gil, explains that they teach you a few at a time at first so that you will really master them. They drill you on them a lot too. Eventually you work up to challenges like the one this screenshot shows. Hey, better now than when you are buying several things at a street market and wondering if you are being overcharged!

Here’s another screenshot with some very useful words:

And here’s an example of an exercise where you match the words:

In the final lesson, Sonia Gil comments that you have learned some three hundred words. I was surprised – I’ve skimmed through all the lessons in the past few weeks, and while I knew practically everything already, it just seemed so easy to pick up a few words here and a few words there, that it didn’t seem that it would be so many words.

Of course you would be a long way from fully speaking Spanish at the end of this course, but I must say that you would have more mastery of Spanish than many foreigners I know who live here in Mexico! And there is Fluenz Spanish 2 coming up… I will review it soon.

In the meantime, you might enjoy my review of the whole Fluenz Spanish program. Fluenz remains my favorite of all the introductory Spanish programs. I think they do a really good job of teaching you the Spanish you need when visiting or living in a Spanish-speaking country. Also, here’s a link to the first two levels of Fluenz at Amazon.

Fluenz Spanish 1: A Review of the Second Half is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Next, there is a dialogue, which they suggest you listen to three times, once with the English and the Spanish subtitles showing, once with just the Spanish ones, and once with no subtitles. Normally there are a lot of new words but for this review lesson, the words you have already learned are put together in new ways. Here’s an example:

Spanish has two different verbs – ser and estar – which mean “to be.” It’s not easy for native English speakers to get them straight, and just the other day a Mexican friend of mine was commenting that she has an Italian friend who mixes them up too, despite otherwise speaking excellent Spanish. I really like how Fluenz Spanish is teaching you phrases like the one you see on the screen – Este amigo es de aqui – and you are absorbing the correct use of the verbs by osmosis.

In the wrap-up discussion of this lesson, Sonia Gil comments that speed training is an element of learning Spanish that is perhaps as important as vocabulary or grammar. How do you get up to speed? By repeated practice. Comments like this are part of the attention to detail that I like in the Fluenz programs.

In Lesson 12, you go places with the verb ir and a conversation with a taxi driver. Lessons 13 and 14 involve shopping for cell phones and learning adjectives and the use of “going to.” I like this one because you can say all kinds of things in the future without knowing future conjugations if you just know the infinitive. I’m going to eat, I’m going to shop, and so on. Lesson 14 also provides more about the subtleties of ser and estar.

To get more of an overview of Fluenz Spanish, see my review at that link.  Or here is the first level on Amazon.com.

Fluenz Spanish Review: Lessons 11 to 14 is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

• A conversation between two women, one a visitor to the city, the other a colleague of someone the visitor is looking for
• An airport discussion with an official, covering names, passports, luggage, and more
• A conversation with a taxi driver while going from the airport to the hotel

At the start of Lesson Eight, Sonia Gil comments that you are going to be learning words related to truth and beauty, and she explains how this is really very practical. It turns out that estar and ser are explored further, with some succinct explanation given, in this set of lessons. Sonia also explains why Fluenz Spanish doesn’t force you to learn accent marks, something I had discussed in my review of Lesson Four.

In Lesson Nine, you learn some words and phrases based on meeting an official at an international airport. Sonia Gil explains that this lesson is based directly on the experiences of Fluenz team member Rachel Margolin, who traveled in Spanish-speaking countries without knowing any Spanish, as preparation for creating this learn-Spanish software. (Tough job, but somebody’s got to do it! Actually, I bet it was a challenge. I’ve traveled in quite a few countries where I didn’t speak the language, and things can get complicated, specially when you are tired or confused. But Rachel at the same time had to be thinking all the time about what should go into Fluenz Spanish! Kudos to her.)

Lesson Ten goes back to a theme introduced earlier, that of a conversation with a taxi driver. I’ve often found that if I say to a Mexican taxi driver that I like their city or country, I get a delighted rapid-fire response that I am lucky to follow. Happily for you, this conversation in the lesson is easier to understand.

I did have to laugh when the male taxi driver asked the solitary female passenger if she was alone. A very Latin question! (She says no, she isn’t. That is the correct answer, no matter what the truth is.)

You can see the Spanish and English above, but the settings allow you to watch the lesson with just Spanish or with no subtitles as well. They suggest you watch it three times, once each way.

The lessons follow the same process of workouts as I’ve described in earlier reviews. I happened to notice that one of the tabs during the interactive workouts said “Words.” I clicked it and found a simple glossary of the words you have learned so far. Handy.

For more, see review of Fluenz Spanish or look at the first level of Fluenz Spanish on amazon.com.

Reviewing Fluenz Spanish: Lessons Eight through Ten is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Lesson Five gives you a variety of useful words: the Spanish versions of where, this, that, here, there, and which. The whole present tense of estar is worked seamlessly into the lesson — you had already learned most of it before. Sonia Gil gives you her personal trick for memorizing vocabulary, with a couple of examples. This is something I also do and it really helps. (I’m curious to see if she will later touch on one of my tricks for memorizing genders of nouns — picturing myself or my husband holding or touching the item in question, depending on its gender.)

She also explains that word order in Spanish sentences is not always the same as in English. They have designed the course to mainly use sentences that have the proper Spanish sentence structure and are understandable to an English speaker. She’s giving you a heads up that out there in real life you may have to figure some sentences out.

In Lesson Six, Fluenz Spanish tackles what Sonia calls "one of the most challenging and feared forms of communication in a new language — the phone conversation." I was impressed that they were dumping you right into that so early in the course! When my husband and I traveled around many parts of Mexico before settling down by Lake Chapala, I had to use public phones on sidewalks a few times, and I was always scared. Sometimes I communicated okay, but not always!

Naturally the dialogue that Fluenz Spanish starts you out with is pretty basic, but it’s a good start. The ever-important "No entiendo" (I don’t understand) is taught, and you learn some words related to location.

Sonia Gil had explained in an earlier lesson that the Spanish you learn with their program avoids using local slang or expressions, and I noticed this in the phone. Here in Mexico where I live, people answer the telephone by saying "Bueno," which means good. I’ve heard that this goes back to the early days of telephones here, when the lines were not always good. So if you heard "Bueno," you could continue the conversation. This localism is NOT taught in Fluenz Spanish, and that’s as it should be.

Lesson Seven is a conversation in a taxi, with the cabdriver. Spanish has two verbs that mean "to be" — estar had already been used in previous lessons and now ser is introduced, with some discussion of the two verbs. It doesn’t get theoretical, though. This program is designed so that by learning specific phrases well through the repetition and drill, you automatically will use them in the ways you have internalized.

Several other useful words are introduced here, including a word I have always loved ever since I first learned it as a child on vacation in Mexico: ahora, which means "now." Many words in Spanish have a beauty to their sounds or otherwise have something special about them, and for me the sound of ahora is lovely. That’s one of the benefits of learning another language — the unexpected delights.

To see my review of the entire Fluenz Spanish program or to see how I rate it compared to other software for learning Spanish, click the links.

Fluenz Spanish: Review of Lessons Five through Seven is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

As usual, the lesson begins with a dialogue, in this case between a waiter and a woman customer. I am getting very fond of the way Sonia Gil then goes through the dialogue and uses it to explain how Spanish works. For example, in this lesson, she talks about the genders of they and us, and the plurals of nouns and adjectives. You also learn that adjectives follow nouns in Spanish, unlike in English.

The workouts include:

• Listening to a word and repeating it
• Matching words and phrases in two columns, one for Spanish and one for English
• Choosing the best image for a word
• Seeing a word in English on your screen and writing it in Spanish, then doing the same with phrases
• Writing words and then phrases that you hear
• Typing conversation you hear
• Recording your own pronunciation if you have a microphone enabled, and getting feedback on it.

All this is done in an interesting and attractive way, and you can see how it gets you using your mind in various ways, both passive and active. By the end of a lesson, you’ve done a lot of drill. Then the next day builds on what you have learned.

Challenge Mode: Your Choice if You Want to Learn Accents

In the exercises where you type words into the program, one of your choices on the top of the Fluenz Spanish software screen is that challenge mode can be on or off. I checked that out during this lesson and it refers to whether you type in accents over letters such as ñ or ú. Their thinking is that since the accents aren’t essential for a beginner to be understood, they could be optional.

Here I have just used this feature to type in the Spanish word for small:

I’d suggest that if learning to write good Spanish is one of your goals, then do use the challenge mode right from the start. I have worked much more on my spoken than on my written Spanish, specially in the past few years here in Mexico, and I turned the challenge mode on. I blush to admit I still made a few mistakes on accents when typing words into this basic  lesson.

The Fluenz help file tells you some very simple ways they have created for the program that you can use in typing the characters in. It’s characteristic of their attention to detail that these ways correspond to the Spanish language keyboard. So if you use that in the future, you’ll have a head start.

To find out more about Fluenz Spanish, see my review or here’s a link to the first level at Amazon.com. (If you get interested in getting it, click on “other products by fluenz” on that Amazon page to compare prices for packages with more levels.)

Fluenz Spanish: Review of Lesson Four is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Lesson Three follows the format of previous lessons, with a conversation which Sonia Gil then analyzes word by word, adding explanations. I really am enjoying how seamlessly she works grammatical explanations into the program.

The variety of exercises that follow include listening to words or phrases and writing them, choosing the best image to match a word on your screen, and more.

If you are a more advanced learner of Spanish, as I am, or for any reason, you can skip ahead to the next workout, or go back to the last workout. Here I did run into the first thing I wished the program had but didn’t: the ability to go back to the word you had just done. Oh well, (or ni modo as we say a lot in Mexico). And I did like a feature that helped me move through the program fast; if I knew something and didn’t want to type it, I could just click on the Answer tab. You could also use this if you didn’t know the word or phrase.

I hadn’t noticed till now that there is nice music playing softly in the background at times, and you can toggle it on or off as you choose. If you have a microphone set up before you begin, there are workouts where you can actually be recorded as you converse. I am writing this review on my old laptop which lacks this ability, so I will comment on it in a future lesson when I’m using my desktop computer.

A basic conversation is followed by a more advanced one. This will really give you a good workout of the Spanish words and phrases that you are learning!

This lesson of the Fluenz Spanish software ends with some comments by Sonia Gil. One comment of hers that I liked is that Fluenz Spanish is designed to help you learn a few things very well. Great approach to learning to speak Spanish. It sure beats knowing a lot of things poorly!

For more, see my review of Fluenz Spanish or check out the first level at Amazon and see what others say.

Fluenz Spanish: Review of Lesson Three is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.