So in my first of what I hope will be a series of reviews of iPhone Apps to Learn Spanish, I decided to review TripSpeak Spanish.
Like a lot of iPhone applications, TripSpeak Spanish comes with a free version and a paid version. I have to like the free version enough to buy the paid version.
TripSpeak Spanish Lite (the free version):
This comes with two lessons – el viaje (travel vocabulary) , el restaurante (food and eating vocabulary. TripSpeak Spanish basically shows you 4 pictures and says a word, phrase or sentence in Spanish. You click on the picture that you believe to match the word said. If you get it correct, you see a green check mark and the next set of pictures comes up. If you get it wrong, you get an X on the picture you selected and you can try another picture, until you get it correct.
This is extremely similar to Rosetta Stone format, except for one KEY difference — the full version of TripSpeak Spanish costs $2.99 — about 1/100th of the cost of Rosetta Stone. I enjoyed playing my way through the first 2 lessons of TripSpeak Spanish, receiving a 94% and 98% and so it was a no-brainer for me to plunk down $2.99 to try my hand at the full program.
I spent more time playing the full TripSpeak Spanish program. I like it, don’t love it.
Here’s what I like about TripSpeak Spanish.
- It’s quick and easy to do each lesson since they each contain 20 sets of cards.
- It’s fun, like a mini-trivia quiz.
- It does build your vocabulary and you can easily master a lesson.
- The words are read out loud clearly in a manner that you could repeat if you wanted to reinforce and learn Spanish that much faster.
Now, why I don’t love the program.
- They didn’t randomize the presentation of the cards. For example, when I was doing animals, my first pass thru I received a low-enough score that I wanted to try again. I had in mind that the first question I had gotten wrong was the frog. So when I saw the word ‘rana’ and didn’t know what it meant, I thought, “Oh that’s probably ‘frog’” — but that is different than my actually having learned that ‘rana’ meant ‘frog’ — instead I learned that the first set of cards I didn’t know the answer to had ‘frog’ as the answer.
- On more advanced concepts, if you get it incorrect, you can’t always figure out what the word means. For example on the screen below the word is es bajo and I didn’t know what that meant
So when I looked at the 4 pictures, here is what my brain thought, “woman with long hair”, “little boy”, “nose” or “looking up”, and “man”. Even when by guessing and getting it wrong, I ultimately settle on the boy, I don’t realize that the phrase “es bajo” means he “is low”. I didn’t see any way of getting additional help other than opening up a Spanish dictionary application. This seems like a substantial oversight. - It is primarily a vocabulary builder with a somewhat limited vocabulary. It is not going to take you much beyond your first college year of Spanish.
Conclusion: If you are just beginning to learn Spanish or want a refresher, then download this iPhone app and start learning Spanish while having fun. Meanwhile I’m going to look at some other iPhone apps out there. Or maybe I’ll play this one a few more times…. It IS fun!
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