About Programmatic Spanish

Description of Programmatic Spanish

Part I of Programmatic Spanish consists of 210 pages of text and 3 hours and 13 minutes of audio. Part II has 286 pages of text, and 3 hours and 52 minutes of audio. Total 496 pages of text, and a little over 7 hours of audio. Download size: Part I 237.8 MB, Part II 186.7 MB. Total 426.5 MB. I am in the process of appropriately illustrating the course, which will increase the file sizes somewhat, but will take a while.

The following was taken almost verbatim from a posting in How-to-learn-any-language.com. (This is a wonderful resource for advice and discussion by experienced language learners, and I highly recommend it.)

Many people consider Programmatic Spanish (PM) an excellent accompaniment to Platiquemos. Programmatic Spanish was never completed (it was supposed to have 100 lessons, but only has 50. Many dealers sell PM as the first to volumes, and then sell the original Basic Course (unedited and not modernized or optimized for use without the book) 3 and 4 as follow-ons. This is a very bad idea, since the two programs differ radically in method and progression of structure elements (see below). I have seen PM advertised for as much as $420, so free is quite a bargain!

I myself used PM for a while at FSI, and didn´t like it. Different people have different learning styles, though, and there are many who think it's great--except for it's not being complete.

I (the poster on How-to-learn-any-language.com) think both courses are good. When I was only using the Basic Course in the form of Platiquemos, I listened to each tape about 14 times over the course of a week. I would have the material down very well at on the 7th day.

Today, I'm doing both courses simultaneously. However, I only go through the Platiquemos lessons 7 times over a weeks time, rather than 14. I still feel I understand the material very well by the 7th day. I do
1 1/2 units from Programmatic Spanish each week also. I think the synergism between the courses makes it so I don't have to repeat the Platiquemos lessons as many times to get them down.

If you cannot sit down with the book, Programmatic Spanish won't be good for you. Most of it's exercises require the book. Platiquemos, on the other hand can be well utilized without the book. The books are helpful though, and I read the book with the lesson the first time through. The second day, I read the dialog before I hit the highway to keep the translation fresh in my mind. One nice thing about Platiquemos is the dialog translation is part of the recording. It's still helpful to read the grammatical points too. They are usually very short.

The two courses cover grammatical points in somewhat different order. Programmatic Spanish starts out with the preterit (one of two Spanish past tenses--[I have no idea why]),whereas Platiquemos uses the more traditional approach of starting with the present tense. Perhaps I can do the Platiquemos units with less review because I've been working on the preterit for weeks with Programmatic Spanish.

Programmatic Spanish volume 1 is described as a 100 hour course. Volume 2 takes the typical student 150 hours. So Programmatic Spanish could be thought of as a 250 hour course.

Platiquemos is self described as 500-600 hour courses. FSI expects a typical bright English student to take 575-600 hours or so to become professionally fluent in a language like Spanish if it's their first foreign tongue.

If you can only study an hour a day, it's probably better to focus on only one of the courses. In that case, I'd make my decision based on whether I like to sit down with a book (or pdf rendition of a book) and recordings, or whether my schedule doesn't permit that amount of time in front of a computer or printout of the book.