Michel Thomas Speak Spanish Vocabulary Builder: 5-CD Vocabulary Program (Michel Thomas Vocabulary Builder)

This course is excellent. If used combination with other learning resources it really will improve your Spanish. Intellegently assembled, the quality of the content makes tolerating the constant references to Michel Thomas and the teacher's piercing Americam accent and non-existant Spanish accent well worth while. Native speakers are used both from Spain and South America as pronnounciations references. I love the anti George Bush Administration subtext. This set of Cd's is a must for anyone who has commuting time for audio work.

I have never been motivated to write a review on Amazon before, but I was so completely annoyed by this CD set that I took it out of my CD player after 20 minutes and am planning to give (or throw)the whole set away. There is a LOT of useless filler verbiage in this this CD set,and someone must have been paid for the number of times the words "Michel Thomas" were used in the script. It was annoying that the sentences the listener was supposed to think of how to say in Spanish were very long and usually pertained to a negative comment about something. However, the thing that I found most annoying was that every time the main speaker would have a native speaker say the long sentence, she would repeat it herself in her blatantly non-native accent, rather than having a native speaker repeat it. This is a torturous way to learn Spanish vocabulary. Even though I'm very motivated to learn Spanish, I can't handle this!

I recently took both the Michel Thomas Introductory and advanced Spanish courses and think they are the very best language learning tools available for self study.

The Vocabulary builder is an excellent way to add to your vocabulary and to review. The first 2 CDs build vocabulary by pointing out the thousands of words in Spanish that are similar or the same in English. The method is to show how to transform from English to Spanish so that you will be able to add words to your vocabulary by knowing how to transform the words from English.

The CDs refer to a user guide which includes an index to the CDs but none was included with my product. This is the only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. Don't know if this was an oversight or not but I would very much like to have the user guide if it is available.

Michel Thomas does not speak Spanish in these CDs. A young woman does on his behalf. That's disappointing but, on the other hand, she does an excellent job and attempts (fairly successfully) to continue in his style. I am only midway through the second CD, so this may well be premature, but I would give her high marks. The approach, in the beginning, is to present transformations of English word-endings into their corresponding Spanish word-endings so that by mastering the transformation you automatically expand your vocabulary by the several words that fit into that class. There are two native speakers that give you good practice in hearing the sentences and phrases as spoken by them. She also repeats the phrases - happily because she is easier to understand. In conclusion, while I am disappointed in the absence of Michel Thomas, I'm still glad I bought the set and would recommend it.