The vocabulary sections are divided up into 8 sections: first words, colors, food, numbers, shopping, countries, time, body. The ninth section is for phrases, and one advantage is that they are pronounced individually for you, which you can do for the individual words, too. There are two categories of games, easy and hard, and the program tracks your progress.

If you like to collect lots of phrase books with basic vocabulary, this might be fine for you, as you can at least learn some words and phrases that might be useful, but for me the major shortcoming is there is nothing on the grammar. I would rather invest the money in the 2-CD version of the half dozen languages I'm interested in, and then pay the extra for the 5 and 8 CD advanced Instant Immersion software when I'm ready to progress to the next stage of learning.

Still, for a reasonable price you get 33 languages, including all the main European ones plus things like Swahili, Korean, Finnish, Hindi, Tibetan, Vietnamese, and so on. So if you like to play around with exotic languages this might be the set for you, but you'll need to supplement it with a real language learning course if you're serious about really going anywhere with your studies.

I need to mention one drawback to the CD's, however. I have reasonably fast, 16x read and 48x write speed CD, and the program still runs fairly slowly, although I have a half gig of RAM and a 2.6 GHz system. It's mostly noticeable when using the pronunciation capability, but it spends a lot of time just seeking when you're jumping between sections. It's tolerable on my CD player, but if you have an older, slower one, be advised it's going to be slow.

One solution would be to get Tenebril software's Virtual Drive Manager program which will copy it to your hard disk so you can run it from there. I've tested it on about a dozen programs and it works on most of them. So it's not a sure thing but the program isn't that expensive and it does work for many things. Tenebril can be found on the web, where I bought it. I don't know if their software is carried by most computer stores or not.

60 of 60 found the following review helpful:


It's not worth for REALLY learning the Language  Mar 26, 2005
My dad got this for me because i like to learn languages. It was misleading for me what is says on the package "each disc a complete course". It is useful for you if you want to learn basic things like phrases for traveling but NOT if you REALLY want to learn the language. If want to learn basic travel things this WILL be for you. But if you want to REALLY Learn the language you better get the Instant Immersion Laguage course devoted to one language.

From Paul

Florida

36 of 38 found the following review helpful:


Instant maybe. Immersion questionable.  Apr 18, 2004 By Reviewer Kid
My dad got this for me to supplement a Latin textbook I have been studying for my high school language course. It is quick and easily understandable. You get plenty of words and phrases, which is perfect for a traveler. If you want to learn the language for the sake of knowing it, not travel, however, you'd better get a book to supplement this. It doesn't teach about pluralization, verb conjugation, or other oddities that the language holds, such as, in Latin, the ending -m which implies a direct object. The Latin CD also does not use the dashes over the vowels, which may or may not be necessary, I don't know. Overall, I am very happy with the product and with the price of $39.99 (USD), but I am also quite glad I have my textbook (ECCE ROMANI) to go with it.

8 of 8 found the following review helpful:


Perfect introduction to any language  Feb 27, 2007 By Charlotte A. Hu
I have lived in Japan, Korea, Chile, Egypt and Panama. I work overseas. Getting a quick grasp of basic vocabulary is critical to my work and lifestyle. This set is the perfect software for an introduction to any language. It's true that it is rather simplistic in design and uses the same graphics for every language. However, it has engaging interactive games that help build the few hundred vocabulary words and phrases. From there, to reach a higher level, you'll have to continue in a regular course. If you are already enrolled in a introductory course, this is great way to keep from getting overwhelmed as it develops enough vocabulary to begin using sentence structures and grammatical structures that professors typically teach.

For those familiar with the DoD and DoS language scoring system, my Spanish is 3, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese 2 and Arabic 1+. I used this program on Korean, Portuguese and French.

If you need a basic familiarization with a range of languages, this software is cheap and fun.

2 of 2 found the following review helpful:


Broad Good Overview  Sep 17, 2008 By A. Gregory
I bought this set of CD's to help me with basic Italian before visiting Italy and they were a great overview. I will also use them for Spanish, Swahili, French and other languages for countries that I plan to visit soon.

See all 8 customer reviews on Amazon.com