Tell Me More Spanish Is Updated


Posted on January 27, 2010 by Rosana

I received an email from Tell Me More not long ago, telling me more (sorry, couldn’t resist) about their new version of their program for learning Spanish. I had been pretty hard on it in my review of Tell Me More Spanish, so I was glad to hear about Version 10.

No doubt about it, this is one of the best-selling programs for learning Spanish, with over seven million users.

They are going to send me a review copy when I move back to the US sometime this spring, but the Mexican mails are not very reliable so I suggested we wait.

“This new version addresses some of the negative points you listed in your review, in addition to 2 new Business levels available for Spanish,” said the email.

Here are some of the new features:

* New User Interface: The most dramatic feature is the completely new interface design. The overall look and feel of the product has been improved significantly. The clean lines, uncluttered screens, intuitive icons, tight color scheme and overall usability are a giant leap foreword.

* New Tracking Tools: Learners are now able to visualize their progress throughout the program. This new feature is a constant throughout the learning experience and provides positive reinforcement to the learner.

* New Introduction: A dynamic new “Getting Started” tutorial has been developed to ensure that learners are able to quickly and easily start using TELL ME MORE as well as take advantage of all of the advanced features.

Here is a list of the Tell Me More Spanish products that are on Amazon, and since it’s a list page that I’ve linked to, it will always have the newest programs listed. By the way, Tell Me More seems to be Windows only in the program version but there is an online version for Mac users.

If you use it, I’d love to know what your experience was with a comment below, and do please mention your version number. Thanks!

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  • http://dlinperu.blogspot.com/ David

    I bought the Tell Me More Spanish version 10 (the newest version) Dec 09 and I really like it so far. I had already gone through Rosetta Stone I, II, and III (but not the newest version of Rosetta Stone) and Tell Me More v10 is MUCH better. I actually live in Peru, and am pretty fluent already in Spanish, but I need to deepen my language abilities for my work and relationships. I'm dating a Peruvian girl and as a missionary I get opportunities to share things with people at a deep level, so I need to be able to converse in Spanish at a deep level. Tell Me More software goes deeper than any other software and is the most complete (I've only done a few lessons so far, but in comparing before I bought this is what I found out). With the new intro levels (2 intro levels before “level 1″) I imagine it's better now for beginners as well. I bought the 5 level version and activated it from levels 6 to ten. I like how you can test yourselves to see what level you are at, and the testing is the same as the official international recognized tests. I like how the grammar is integrated with the lessons, and in the “guided mode” (which is the recommended mode) there are continually different exercises, grammar lessons, conversations (listening to a question than having to speak to respond to be heard by the speech recognition), crossword puzzles, complete the sentence, multiple choice, writing what you hear and getting graded on spelling and accents (adjustable under preferences) etc., that keep it from being boring.

    Besides the 10 guided levels (5 in the package I got), there are additional tools called Resources.

    “Resources:”
    1. “Language Explanations”
    193 Grammar lessons (sorted by levels I believe)
    12 Spelling lessons (under Vocabulary)
    12 lessons of Meanings of words and expressions (under Vocabulary)
    3 phonetics lessons
    -one error I found (I think): they said “aun” means “same” (this is wrong, it actually means “even, still”) and that “aún” means “again” (this is wrong, it actually means “yet”).

    2.Glossary
    8621 words broken into lexical groups and levels. The lexical groups are different topics organized in more general topics organized in more general topics, etc. Helpful if you want to learn words specifically about “relationships”, or “foods”, etc.
    -some words in glossary repeat ex: bronceador. I'm assuming b/c maybe the words overlap in the lexical groups, but there don't seem to be a lot of repeats.

    3.Conjugation – it really does conjugate every single tense (14) and mood. 1375 Verbs organized by levels and moods. This is a lot more conjugation than the 501 Verbs book!

    4.Atlas – maps with some limited info (not super helpful). The drop down window for different areas repeats each entry once at the bottom of the list (I think it's kinda like a programming typo, but is not a big deal).

    5. Civilization – videos (or sometimes just changing pictures with audio) and the script written out so you can read what they're saying that you can turn on and off. Right click to get the definition, pronunciation, or to practice saying the word.

    Other comments:
    -I set the difficulty setting to “Very Difficult” (which I like that you can change this) in the preferences of the TELL ME MORE menu for voice recognition, but in the activities themselves it resets it to “Easy” for each word… I have to change it for each word. Annoying. I want to notify the company and hopefully they'll provide a quick update to this.
    -I'm actually using it on Mac computer with parallels, and it works fine… although I'd much prefer it native to Mac (I think they might have one in 2011 or 2012 or so)
    -Another annoyance (and this might be just me) is that on my mac I'm used to using ALT + Left (or Right) to jump from word to word (like Control + Left /right in windows). In this program if you press the ATL + L (or) R combination it for some reason makes you quit the program and enter back into it, with typically losing about 10 minutes of work.
    -the language of the instructions can be changed to English, Spanish, French, Dutch
    -it comes w/ a basic headphones / mic unit w/ two 3.5 mm male plugs.
    -I don't like how the TMM online thing makes you use Internet Explorer, but once again, probably not a big deal.
    -TMM tips or demo video really make it easy to learn how to use the software in less than 15 min. Also hovering the mouse over something typically tells you what a button does. My opinion is that if you make a program too simple, you're limited in options, if it's too complicated, it's too hard to use. TMM seems to have a good balance.
    -The online Euronews is pretty good. There was a news video in Spanish with a comprehension question, fill in the blank, conjugation, and grammar lesson.
    -I like the Statistics. you can see what percentage of the lesson is complete and approx. time remaining in lesson, what percentage of skills you've practiced (listening, speaking, writing, reading), time spent this week in hours with a bar graph comparing different weeks.
    -There's not an easy way to tell what the current update is… do I have to write it down to remember? How do I know if I have to update it?

    Conclusion: If you want to go real deep in the language, this is the software to buy if you have a computer. I don't know about the other versions of Tell Me More, but this one (version 10) seems intuitive with a quick learning curve of how to use it. It's slightly annoying that you have the DVD-ROM in the drive to use it, but Rosetta Stone was the same so I imagine it's common practise. If you don't like a particular exercise (like writing, speaking, crossword puzzles) you can skip it, but really the variety is good enough to allow you to keep going for hours. From what I've seen on the website of Fluenz, it looks beautiful and fancy and is probably good competition for TMM if you're looking for beginning to intermediate(?) Spanish (it might be better, who knows, but I bet it has less variety in exercises…?), but for those who want to learn to the advanced levels, this is the clear winner.
    -And a comment about customer service… I actually found this software as I was looking for English teaching software for my Peruvian girlfriend and it won all these awards for teaching English, then figured out it taught Spanish as well, so I bought both and got a better discount for buying both :) But the guy there in sales really talked to me (over a series of months) and guided me through a tour of the program for me and that was really helpful. If TMM updates their software to fix the bug that automatically changes the voice recognition preference to Easy when I set it on Very Difficult, I'll update my comment here on LearnSpanishRapidly.com.

    I might make another post on this website of the free websites there are out there and my review on those as there's tons of free stuff out there… but more or less it's a lesson here and there, and it's scattered and not set up in progressive levels like a multimedia software package is… that being said I highly recommend the free websites as supplementary, but not as your primary source of learning.

    (sorry if this is too lengthy of a review, but I know I like to know everything I can about a product I spend hundreds of dollars on, so hopefully this helps)

  • http://dlinperu.blogspot.com/ David

    I bought the Tell Me More Spanish version 10 (the newest version) Dec 09 and I really like it so far. I had already gone through Rosetta Stone I, II, and III (but not the newest version of Rosetta Stone) and Tell Me More v10 is MUCH better. I actually live in Peru, and am pretty fluent already in Spanish, but I need to deepen my language abilities for my work and relationships. I'm dating a Peruvian girl and as a missionary I get opportunities to share things with people at a deep level, so I need to be able to converse in Spanish at a deep level. Tell Me More software goes deeper than any other software and is the most complete (I've only done a few lessons so far, but in comparing before I bought this is what I found out). With the new intro levels (2 intro levels before “level 1″) I imagine it's better now for beginners as well. I bought the 5 level version and activated it from levels 6 to ten. I like how you can test yourselves to see what level you are at, and the testing is the same as the official international recognized tests. I like how the grammar is integrated with the lessons, and in the “guided mode” (which is the recommended mode) there are continually different exercises, grammar lessons, conversations (listening to a question than having to speak to respond to be heard by the speech recognition), crossword puzzles, complete the sentence, multiple choice, writing what you hear and getting graded on spelling and accents (adjustable under preferences) etc., that keep it from being boring.

    Besides the 10 guided levels (5 in the package I got), there are additional tools called Resources.

    “Resources:”
    1. “Language Explanations”
    193 Grammar lessons (sorted by levels I believe)
    12 Spelling lessons (under Vocabulary)
    12 lessons of Meanings of words and expressions (under Vocabulary)
    3 phonetics lessons
    -one error I found (I think): they said “aun” means “same” (this is wrong, it actually means “even, still”) and that “aún” means “again” (this is wrong, it actually means “yet”).

    2.Glossary
    8621 words broken into lexical groups and levels. The lexical groups are different topics organized in more general topics organized in more general topics, etc. Helpful if you want to learn words specifically about “relationships”, or “foods”, etc.
    -some words in glossary repeat ex: bronceador. I'm assuming b/c maybe the words overlap in the lexical groups, but there don't seem to be a lot of repeats.

    3.Conjugation – it really does conjugate every single tense (14) and mood. 1375 Verbs organized by levels and moods. This is a lot more conjugation than the 501 Verbs book!

    4.Atlas – maps with some limited info (not super helpful). The drop down window for different areas repeats each entry once at the bottom of the list (I think it's kinda like a programming typo, but is not a big deal).

    5. Civilization – videos (or sometimes just changing pictures with audio) and the script written out so you can read what they're saying that you can turn on and off. Right click to get the definition, pronunciation, or to practice saying the word.

    Other comments:
    -I set the difficulty setting to “Very Difficult” (which I like that you can change this) in the preferences of the TELL ME MORE menu for voice recognition, but in the activities themselves it resets it to “Easy” for each word… I have to change it for each word. Annoying. I want to notify the company and hopefully they'll provide a quick update to this.
    -I'm actually using it on Mac computer with parallels, and it works fine… although I'd much prefer it native to Mac (I think they might have one in 2011 or 2012 or so)
    -Another annoyance (and this might be just me) is that on my mac I'm used to using ALT + Left (or Right) to jump from word to word (like Control + Left /right in windows). In this program if you press the ATL + L (or) R combination it for some reason makes you quit the program and enter back into it, with typically losing about 10 minutes of work.
    -the language of the instructions can be changed to English, Spanish, French, Dutch
    -it comes w/ a basic headphones / mic unit w/ two 3.5 mm male plugs.
    -I don't like how the TMM online thing makes you use Internet Explorer, but once again, probably not a big deal.
    -TMM tips or demo video really make it easy to learn how to use the software in less than 15 min. Also hovering the mouse over something typically tells you what a button does. My opinion is that if you make a program too simple, you're limited in options, if it's too complicated, it's too hard to use. TMM seems to have a good balance.
    -The online Euronews is pretty good. There was a news video in Spanish with a comprehension question, fill in the blank, conjugation, and grammar lesson.
    -I like the Statistics. you can see what percentage of the lesson is complete and approx. time remaining in lesson, what percentage of skills you've practiced (listening, speaking, writing, reading), time spent this week in hours with a bar graph comparing different weeks.
    -There's not an easy way to tell what the current update is… do I have to write it down to remember? How do I know if I have to update it?

    Conclusion: If you want to go real deep in the language, this is the software to buy if you have a computer. I don't know about the other versions of Tell Me More, but this one (version 10) seems intuitive with a quick learning curve of how to use it. It's slightly annoying that you have the DVD-ROM in the drive to use it, but Rosetta Stone was the same so I imagine it's common practise. If you don't like a particular exercise (like writing, speaking, crossword puzzles) you can skip it, but really the variety is good enough to allow you to keep going for hours. From what I've seen on the website of Fluenz, it looks beautiful and fancy and is probably good competition for TMM if you're looking for beginning to intermediate(?) Spanish (it might be better, who knows, but I bet it has less variety in exercises…?), but for those who want to learn to the advanced levels, this is the clear winner.
    -And a comment about customer service… I actually found this software as I was looking for English teaching software for my Peruvian girlfriend and it won all these awards for teaching English, then figured out it taught Spanish as well, so I bought both and got a better discount for buying both :) But the guy there in sales really talked to me (over a series of months) and guided me through a tour of the program for me and that was really helpful. If TMM updates their software to fix the bug that automatically changes the voice recognition preference to Easy when I set it on Very Difficult, I'll update my comment here on LearnSpanishRapidly.com.

    I might make another post on this website of the free websites there are out there and my review on those as there's tons of free stuff out there… but more or less it's a lesson here and there, and it's scattered and not set up in progressive levels like a multimedia software package is… that being said I highly recommend the free websites as supplementary, but not as your primary source of learning.

    (sorry if this is too lengthy of a review, but I know I like to know everything I can about a product I spend hundreds of dollars on, so hopefully this helps)