Excerpts from reviews of Barron's Mastering Spanish posted on Amazon.com. Information about how these criticisms have been addressed in Platiquemos follows the excerpts; the numbered paragraphs correspond to the numbers indicated.

As others have complained, the speed of the speakers, though probably authentic, is much too fast for a beginner (1) and the voices of the two characters are not different enough in tone to be easily distinguished.(2) The tapes for Spanish I should have been done more slowly and distinctly.

Worse, I found myself continually annoyed because of the out of date, male centered situations and conversation.(3)

The dialogues can be quite sexist--lots of comments about sexy brunettes, fat girls with glasses, etc.-- and you almost never hear a female speaker.(3)

The only information missing (and Barron's won't tell you) is that part three and four of this course are available from Audioforum... under the titles Advanced Spanish A and B, for 185.- each.(4)

The tapes are not very good, the people on the tapes speak so fast it's hard to learn the pronunciation of words.(1) The study course is absolutely dull as well.(5)

For some reason, the book presents all of the Spanish in both PHONETIC representation, as well standard Spanish spelling. The phonetics, which are given enormous precedence over the Spanish spellings, are not only useless, they're annoying and distracting!(6) To add insult to injury, the dictionary appendix at the end of the book isn't even in Spanish alphabetical order.(7)

The book was the weak point, with some basically useless phoneticized spellings for helping pronunciation(6)

The book is basically useless and the cassette tapes are not much better.(8) There are a lot of vocabulary drills, however, the book fails to identify the translation of the majority of these words in English.(6)

The problem is that it is very dull.(9) The book has phonetic transcriptions of everything-something most people won't care about.

Comparison of Platiquemos with FSI original and Barron's copy

Barron’s Educational Series, along with several other companies, has been selling copies of the Foreign Service Institute Basic Course in Spanish almost since it was developed in 1957. During this entire period, neither Barron’s nor anybody else had made any effort to either modernize the course, or to correct some of its content and formatting problems which make it difficult for most people to use. Despite this, however, the FSI course has remained, and still is, one of the best-selling self-study programs on the market. This is a tribute to the unparalleled excellence of the program’s basic core content. Through almost 50 years, it has remained themost complete, proven successful vehicle to attain serious proficiency in Spanish.

When I, having learned Spanish at the Foreign Service Institute with this program, decided to modernize and revise the program for a general audience, the challenge was to create an essentially new course, while retaining the core content that has made the FSI course so successful over the decades. In addition to illustrating the text with authentic illustrations (over 500) which are used as vehicles for conveying cultural information, and re-typing it to make it more legible and easier to read, there were several weaknesses in the original, both the text and audio, that needed to be addressed.

Amazon.com provides a valuable service to readers in enabling them to review books and have their reviews available to others. Below are some of the readers comments taken verbatim from the Amazon website. Interestingly, the readers’ comments repeated the issues addressed in creating Platiquemos. The major issues are in eight areas, which are noted. My comments on these problem areas follow.

!) There was a strong consensus among several native Spanish speakers that the audio is spoken so fast as to be sometimes almost unintelligible. It is true that "natural" speaking speed is important, but the speed on the original audio is unnaturally fast. One of our goals in our recording was to retain "natural" speech, but to ensure that it is spoken at an understandable speed. Interestingly, the original audio has markedly slower speech at the higher levels--apparently the originators realized that the beginning was too fast.

2) The Platiquemos program has triple the number of voices of the original. Also, instead of two males, one of the two principal characters in the ongoing story which comprises the basic sentences is a female in thePlatiquemos version. (See 3 below)

3) The inadvertent sexism of the original is inappropriate in the 21st century. In addition to the female principal character, we added five more female voices in the audio. This is particularly important since the majority of language learners are female, and they need appropriate models. Students won’t come across a fat girl with glasses, but they’ll meet a tall guy with glasses.

4) The failure to inform buyers that they only have half of the entire program is one of Barron’s biggest sins. A student who diligently completed Barron’s two levels thinking she had completed the entire program could be very disappointed to discover that a very big part is missing. Platiquemos has the second part as Levels V through VIII. For those who might be interested, the original Levels III and IV are available from AudioForum and some other vendors for a price about equal to Platiquemos.

5) Once again, there is consensus that the original text is not very well formatted or presented. One of the main reasons for this in the case of Barron's is that they took an already indistinct original in 8 1/2 x 11 format and reduced it to 7 x 9--making the type very small. The Platiquemos text has been completely re-typeset for legibility. Platiquemos also contains over 500 authentic illustrations, which not only provide visual relief, but are used to introduce cultural and historical information.

6) Yet again, strong consensus that the phonetic alphabet, which dominates the first 30 units, isn’t useful enough to overcome its distraction. Spanish is very phonetic using the Roman alphabet, and a complex phonetic alphabet just isn’t needed. Pronunciation subtleties are much better learned using the audio. The phonetic alphabet problem was exacerbated by in places presenting words and sentences only in the phonetic alphabet. The Platiquemos version is entirely in the normal Roman alphabet.

7) The Platiquemos Glossaries are in the Roman alphabet, and alphabetized accordingly.

8) Not much to say here, except that I’ve tried to make sure nobody says that about Platiquemos!

In summation, the main difference between Platiquemos and Barron’s copy of the original FSI course is that Platiquemos has been created for a general audience in the 21st century; the original was created for a captive government audience in the 1950's. Platiquemos was created over a period of ten years, using experience with hundreds of students.

Despite its antiquity, and the weaknesses which the original authors themselves state they would have liked to correct for the second printing, but didn’t, the FSI program is still the benchmark against which all others are measured, and most fall short. What I hope to have accomplished with Platiquemos is to preserve the essential core of the FSI program, which made it so successful over the decades, while presenting it in a modern, interesting manner. The key is to engage the student’s interest so that she/he will actually be motivated to continue working with the program until proficiency is achieved. Student reaction would seem to indicate that goal has been achieved.

NOTE: Barron's has recently come out with a "new edition of this intensive language-immersion course [which] has been updated with new references, and up-to-date vocabulary and idioms." While we haven't yet had a chance to examine this product, it seems likely that they have merely reprinted the same book as the previous "edition" (anything else would require re-typing the entire 1400 pages), and re-copied the original audio (once again, anything else would have required recording 50 hours of audio). What it appears they have done is add a cd with extra material. While this extra material may be of some value, it does nothing to address the problems discussed above.

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