Español Rápido
or
FAST Spanish

Even for serious students of Spanish, including those at the beginning and middle of Platiquemos--and even those who have completed Platiquemos or a similar program--I have long felt the need for something more practical, something which will quickly give the student the ability to deal with many situations encountered on a visit or when newly arrived in a Spanish-speaking country.

Fortunately, such a program exists.  In the 1980's, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) developed a program called FAST (Familiarization and Short Term Training).  Anybody who is familiar with FSI's language programs knows that they are the ""gold standard", equaled by few and excelled by none.  FAST was intended for those who it was deemed wouldn't need the high level of proficiency (and the time investment) of the Basic Course (Platiquemos), but who would need to be able to deal with skill and ease with the myriad situations that arise when one is new to a Spanish-speaking country.  Based on FAST, we have developed Español Rápido (ER), primarily re-formatting for usability and updating cultural information.

The situations covered range from ordering a meal in a restaurant to dealing with a medical emergency. After almost 30 years of experience in Latin America, I still occasionally find myself baffled by items on restaurant menus, largely because of regional differences. That's taken care of in ER-- Appendix D contains the most exhaustive list of foodstuffs I've ever seen, including regional differences.

The entire ER program consists of 510 pages of text, and a little over 7 hours of audio (incidentally, the audio is of excellent quality).  Those familiar with Platiquemos  will know that I don't put a little bit of text on a page with a lot of blank space to increase the number of pages, but put as much information as reasonably possible on each page.

We developed ER for two groups:
     a)  Those who don't have the time and\or need for the intensive study offered by Platiquemos, but who still need some practical basic Spanish (although we hope some will be motivated to go further); and
     b)  As a supplement for serious students, including those in the beginning (or even advanced) stages of Platiquemos to acquire some serious skills quickly while working through Platiquemos (this applies to other programs, too).

The methodology of ER is quite different from that of Platiquemos, and for Platiquemos students may appear strange.  It does, however, work--as proved by hundreds of students over the past 20-something years.

Rather than bore you with more description, we have prepared some samples for your perusal.

The Table of Contents in html format for quick access is here.

The preface and introduction in .pdf format are here.  (\you'll need an Adobe Acrobat reader for these, if you don't have one, one is available free from www.adobe.com.  For \Mac users, www.stuffit.com also has a free one.

The entire text (19pp) of Cycle 3 is here also in .pdf format.

The audio for Cycle 3 18-plus minutes) is here.  You'll need to ''unzip'' the file (a free program is at www.winzip.com); and then you'll need an mp3 player.  For Windows users, the Windows Media Player will work; for Mac users, Quicktime is usually included in the software or can be downloaded.

For those who have some experience with Spanish, Cycle 3 will seem extremely simple.  Don't forget this is only the beginning--there are 35 more Cycles yet to come.

At present, we are only able to offer ER in download and "digital" versions.  We expect to have it in ''hard copy''  soon. 

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