Review: Tell Me More Spanish

Tell Me More Spanish is a comprehensive software program for Windows users. It has an attractively designed interface, and its website states that the Tell Me More software has been used by millions of people and by governments, universities, and corporations.

But I had problems with it, and I'll tell you why in detail below.

UPDATE March 2010: There is a new version out that may be much better, from what I hear. I haven't seen it. For now, I'm leaving this review as I wrote it in 2008.

In a nutshell, I found it to be confusing and scattered in its approach to language teaching. And when I later did extensive research online, I found a lot of other people who agreed with me. (There were also people who liked the program.)

First, the Good...

The program's website states that Tell Me More Spanish is the most comprehensive Spanish software, offering 10 levels from beginner to expert and over two thousand hours of training. It includes:

• Advisors available 24/7 to answer any questions you may have, through online chat.
• Weekly lessons tied in to current events.
• Tests you can take to see how you are doing.
• Speech recognition software which they describe as the most powerful on the market.
• Role playing through enjoyable interactive videos.
• MP3 and other files so you can learn wherever you are.
• Printable lists of vocabulary and explanations of grammar.

The Demo

I got off to a bad start with Tell Me More Spanish. It wouldn't let me into the demo from Firefox, and even when I switched to Internet Explorer, I had some snags.

One thing: if your whole screen goes black (as mine did) when the program comes on in IE, you are not in trouble. It's just how they set things up. Scared me for a minute! If you want to change to the previous program you were in on your computer, just click on Alt and Tab at the same time. Alt and Tab again will get you back to the demo.

If you want to check the demo out yourself, just click on this image of their software box. There is a "Free Demo" button on the upper right of the page. You will need to give your name and email to see the demo.

Once I was into the demo, the Tell Me More program was attractive. It is designed with a kind of minimalist look, with a highly stylized interface where I had to keep guessing what the icons might mean. It uses a program called Flash, which you may have installed on your computer.

What's in the Sample Lesson?

At the end of the conversation, a vocabulary list of 20 words from the lesson came up. You could click on one and it would be pronounced.

A useful feature let you find out more about a word. To use that, a box opens above the screen and then you click on the word that interests you. (Took me a little while to figure that out. I was clicking on the word first, which didn't work.) If it's a verb, you can see it conjugated in all of Spanish's numerous tenses, but you can't cut and paste the words from there to study them later. Probably just as well for beginners.

Something I found confusing was how the program skips around. I would be looking at three flags and having to click on the Spanish name of the country the flag was from.

Then goodbye flags and there were pictures of a man and you had to decide if he was muchacha, señor, or esposa.

Piece of cake for me, but if you are just beginning Spanish, how are you to know? Trial and error is the philosophy here evidently, and of course that's how children learn. Rosetta Stone Spanish uses the same approach.

I tried a crossword puzzle at Tell Me More, and it was kind of fun, but I thought the words would be beyond the vocabulary level of a beginner.

Then I got into another module which had some grammar explanations: noun genders and subject pronouns. I clicked on the first one, but the page locked up. When I got back to the page by re-opening Internet Explorer and browsing my history list, Tell Me More retained no memory of what I had just been doing.

No matter; I had seen enough to say that it looked like a page out of a grammar text.

My impression of the demo: Scattered and confusing. Didn't build from one thing to the next. Didn't start with the basics you would want to learn first.

So I didn't have that great an experience with Tell Me More Spanish.

I went back about a week later, again in Internet Explorer, and spent about ten minutes fruitlessly trying to get back into the demo. I simply could not do it, even when I tried to start over with a different email address of mine.

What Do Others Think?

After that, I went all over the internet looking for reviews of Tell Me More Spanish. I went to Amazon, to big review sites like about.com, to scholarly sites, to websites selling the program, to forums where people learning languages express their opinions. I read and read...

Some People Liked It...

I found reviewers who thought highly of the program.

I found people who had used the program and were very happy with how much Spanish they had learned.

This didn't surprise me. "Different strokes for different folks," after all!

And Others Had Criticisms:

I also found many comments from people whose points I will summarize here.

• Several people said that the primary focus is European Spanish, rather than Latin American, making Tell Me More Spanish less pertinent for many Americans. One of these people said that the speech recognition software required him to practice with the Castilian accent used in much of Spain rather than with the Latin American Spanish he wanted to learn. The product ships with both, at least for the early lessons.
  
• Others commented that the documentation and help were minimal. (This could have been corrected recently. The website says that they now have 24/7 online chat help)
  
• Someone had an incompatible sound card, which may well be the problem I had too.
  
• Others found the organization to be illogical, as I had. And several complained that they couldn't get out of a particular exercise without finishing it.
  
• Some Mac users were unhappy that it didn't have a Mac version.
  
• Some couldn't return it for a refund. (I checked this and the company states it offers a 90-day guarantee "exclusively on this official site.")

One lengthy article that I found was written by a professor of Spanish who does research into how people learn Spanish as a second language.

She reviewed the basic Tell Me More Spanish module and commented that "much of its content and its approach to the teaching of Spanish constitute a classic example of missed opportunities."

The professor sums up her article by saying that the program is "out of step" (her words) with modern views of how to learn a foreign language.

Want to Take a Look Yourself?

Their website is certainly impressive, and a lot of people do think highly of the program. To check it out yourself, assuming you use Windows, use this link:

TELL ME MORE - Free 2nd Day Shipping

Or you can find it at Amazon.com:

• Tell Me More Spanish, 5 levels 
• Tell Me More Spanish Performance has all ten levels.

And here is an eBay link to whatever is currently available there for Tell Me More Spanish.

And if you decide I was unfair to the program, please do come back here and tell me! Either email me via the contact form, or make a comment on one of the posts in the Tell Me More category of my learning Spanish blog.