Our Method
With Camino del éxito we incorporate two very important principles. First, a relatively small body of material is learned so well that it becomes easy for the student to reproduce it. This is known as "overlearning."
The second principle concerns authenticity. The Spanish you will learn is Spanish as it is really spoken in actual conversations - things you can really use when you travel and interact with native speakers. Not some academic vision of what you "should" learn.
Start with pronunciation.
Your very first task is to develop a positive, successful attitude. The quickest way to achieve this is to gain confidence in your pronunciation.
This is something that most courses fail to recognize. They don't realize that many people are a little bit shy or inhibited about trying to speak a new language. That's why the first part of our course zeroes in on pronunciation, and quickly gets you feeling like you are "doing it right."
With that newfound confidence, your enthusiasm rises and the stage is set for success in the next phase of your learning - communication.
Focus on communication.
With our course, we teach you the basics. You learn real life Spanish as you follow the life of an American who moves to a Latin American country.
If you learn how to say, "I'd like a bowl of rice" it then becomes quite simple to say, "I'd like a bowl of beans." So we choose the vocabulary very carefully, and only include high-frequency words that are going to be very useful.
This is an extension of the "overlearning" principle. Rather than distracting you with lots of words, we focus more on structures - structures that can be expanded and used in a variety of situations.
Click here for some tips for expanding your vocabulary.
Grammar.
Our customers love our grammar explanations because they are so clear and easy to understand, and the quizzes and tests provide instant feedback.
Grammar can teach you something in minutes that might take days to figure out by immersion alone. Our course is effective because it uses both grammar and immersion techniques.
Immersion.
Something magical happens when you are immersed in a foreign language. A change takes place in your brain and you become much more receptive to language learning.
While immersion is great, it's not really magic. You could immerse yourself in Spanish radio all day long, and you wouldn't learn much, because you wouldn't have any cues to help you give meaning to the sounds.
In linguistics, this is called "comprehensible input." That's just a fancy way of saying that you need to be able to make sense out of what you hear or it's not going to be helpful.
By combining our CDs with our companion website, we are able to eliminate most of the English from the CDs, thereby transforming each one into its own little immersion experience, full of "comprehensible input."
If you find yourself agreeing and think that our method makes sense, I urge you to try our complete conversation course – Camino del éxito. It really will allow you to speak Spanish conversationally.
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