Instant Immersion Spanish Deluxe review:4 stars (Good language review but not for beginners.) - I am trying to get back into learning the Spanish Language. I took 3 years of it in high school and my vocabulary was very limited. I'm been using it for a month and this is the longest time I've stuck with a language program. The program tries to make it as fun as possible with crosswords and a hangman type game. If I didn't have some prior knowledge of Spanish, I wouldn't have been totally lost though. The three audio CDs will help true beginners but they bored me. 1 stars (+++ BEWARE: DEFINITELY NOT FOR BEGINNERS +++) - I have been listening to about 30 minutes to 1 hour of spanish (various adio CDs) every day for the last 2 weeks, I think I've made a lot of progress with those and yet I **REALLY** struggled with this product. It says it is for beginners, intermediate & advanced... BZZZZT - WRONG!!

With the word association game, you basically have to GUESS what a word is [because when you hover the mouse over the word it won't reveal what it is], either that or look it up. HOWEVER you can't refer to the glossary while doing the exercise. So it becomes a futile game of trial and error. :-(

What good is a program that doesn't teach you the words first???!!! It's extremely frustrating, to say the least.

They would have been better off showing you the picture of the house, and saying: "that is a house" in spanish ("Eso es una casa", or whatever - and know I didn't learn that from using this software). So that eventually you at least know how to say that phrase. But instead they chuck you in the deep end, bombarding you with many new phrases. They could have put the pictures & videos to much better use by first telling you what they are & quizzing you on it later (we remember better with visual cues). I can't understand why this is the #1 selling software - it certainly explains why so many Americans can't speak spanish!! ;-)

I agree with one of the other reviewers. Instant immersion is no good if you feel absolutely, totally & utterly LOST. Why do I think this? Because you feel like you are failing miserably. And that basically destroys ALL your confidence in being able to learn a new language. I believe you have to feel like you are making progress to succeed.

Q:If you start off, fail the first exercise, fail everything else you attempt, don't even know when you are failing, discover that after 30 minutes or so you never even got close to a score of 100%, what happens to your motivation level?
A: It sinks down to about zero, and you hit the "door exit" icon pretty quickly.

I am glad this is not my only spanish learning material; I would have quickly given up trying to learn spanish otherwise.

--- DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY!!! ---1 stars (Needs a Complete Redesign) - Instant Immersion Spanish Deluxe is an enigma. Clearly significant development effort was devoted to the original application framework. However, there are so many problems with the application in its current form, it appears that there were either two development groups (i.e. the company or the intellectual property was acquired) with a disjointed development process or the company ran out of money during the development process.

While there are some gee wiz features, such an avatar that shows proper lip movements for various words, the program is very poorly designed. There is a calendar and task lists that supposedly coach the user through his or her progression. Yet the tasks jump around in difficultly without proper repetition and with no continuity between steps.

Other problems include the fundamental content. In some of the question and answer modules, the pictures do not correspond to clear answers. In other words, there would be a very basic scene and three potential answers written in Spanish for which it is not clear, even with the English translations, what a "correct" answer would be.

In summary, Instant Immersion Spanish has myriad content that should be displayed in a completely redesigned interface with improved progression of the material.

Cons (notice how Cons comes before Pros)
1)Hard to navigate
2)Material difficulty doesn't follow a clear pattern
3)Oddly vague answers to specific questions
4)Can't copy the program to disk requiring the reliance on the five CDs

Pros
1)Good audio CD's (three separate audio disks)
2)Advanced content (mixing audio and video; avatar)

Instant Immersion Spanish Deluxe Features:
Computer software (programs)
Education (Educational)
Reference
Foreign Languages (Language)
Spanish Espanol
Portuguese
Learn learning
CD
Pentium (166 MHz recommended) Windows 95 and higher, including XP
16 MB RAM (32 MB RAM recommended) 90 MB HD (110 MB recommended) 2X CD-ROM drive (12X CD-ROM drive recommended)
16-bit Windows compatible sound card 640 x 480, 256 color graphics card (1,024 x 768, 65,53f6 color graphics card recommended) Microphone and speakers or headset Internet access and e-mail address r

Instant Immersion Spanish Deluxe is the CD-ROM version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around 29.99USD.