Complete Spanish Step-by-Step

By: Barbara Bregstein

Narrated by: Rachel Story

Complete Spanish Step-by-Step is a top-selling Spanish book on all of Amazon! With more than 1,000 four- and five-star reviews, the reviews speak for themselves. Now, it’s your turn to learn Spanish with us! This audio course is designed to help you learn Spanish as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.

Note: Complete Spanish Step-by-Step includes Easy Spanish Step-by-Step as its first 15 chapters. The subsequent chapters, 16-30, provide a deeper dive into learning Spanish.

No one wants to spend effort and hours learning a language, and still not truly, authentically, be able to speak it. Well—no se preocupe (“don’t worry”)—with years of experience and thousands of success stories, we’ve got you covered! No matter your reason, once you’ve committed yourself to learning this beautiful language, you want to be sure you do it right. Right?

Here’s what you can expect from your Easy Spanish Step-by-Step course:

• Be ready to listen and speak—a lot! This is the way that each and every one of us learned our first language, and the number one way that our brain actually learns and remembers information. You will be speaking Spanish out loud within your first few minutes with us.
• Learn correct grammar and be able to apply it to your communication. This audio course is the product of a fusion of two methods: comprehensive grammatical understanding blended with authentic, child-like acquisition through listening and speaking.
• Actively engage in your learning with dynamic practice activities! This course is not a podcast or a lecture to simply listen to. You are going to be interacting with us the entire time: responding to questions, filling in the missing word, giving your opinions, and more.
• Tune your ‘Spanish ear’ to an authentic, native Spanish-speaker accent. Your new Spanish teacher, Rachel, is accompanied by Jorge, a native Spanish speaker. Adapt your listening skills to the “real” Spanish you will hear out in the community and across the world—not only the slow, clearly-enunciated Spanish you would hear in a classroom setting.
• Make meaningful connections between newly introduced words and concepts and your own life, further increasing your brain’s ability to remember them thanks to the personal connection.
• Develop your skills through a natural mix of language structure and fluid, conversational-style listening.
• Listen to original stories and poems in Spanish and demonstrate understanding through interactive questions.
• Receive consistent encouragement to recognize your growth, and to always take the course at your own pace.

Easy Spanish Step-by-Step is designed in such a way that each section builds upon the last to help your brain progressively create lasting and meaningful connections to each new word and grammar concept. Simply by listening and speaking out loud with us, you will naturally progress, step-by-step, toward Spanish communication and fluency.

©2020 McGraw Hill (P)2021 Upfront Books

Well-paced learning

I really like the way this is organized and paced. Rachel has an easy and logical way of introducing vocabulary and grammar. The helper, Juan is sometimes hard to understand. He has a Cuban accent and I understand the need for different accents, but he's just hard to understand sometimes, like his speech is muddled. However, it doesn't detract too much from the overall learning experience. This would get 5 stars if it included a PDF to help lend clarity to vocabulary and pronunciation.

Post Production Fail!

I have listened to all of the audiobook up to but not including chapter 7. I also have read and finished the physical book (all 30 chapters) before I picked this title up. I love the physical book but this audio book, so far, has missed the mark.

My first gripe was that the production team lost the opportunity to break the navigation of the chapters up further among its respective smaller sections. So, you will have to manage your own stopping points, as opposed to having the opportunity to learn different subsections in chunks. For example, almost each section of the audio book is an entire chapter and is 2 hours long. This does not do a "audio" language learning program justice. Even if you want to use bookmarks, there is no real indication in the audio chapters that show when one subsection ends and other begins. And easy temporary fix for this can be to upload a pdf that shows the time stamps.

My second gripe, though it's a bit small, is that the audio muffles from time to time.

My third gripe is that the Hispanic author is very monotone. He puts no “life” into the readings. No expressions. No excitement. Nada. This could be a time to shine, but he does not. He just…reads.
BUT, then I got to the practice section right before chapter 7 and realized that the production team totally missed the mark. This practice section is not in alignment with the book or what has been taught on the audio program up this point. It appears that both the practice questions for Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 were merged into this practice section, although the material in Chapter 7 has not yet been covered up to this point. I can see many people who only try to use this audiobook as a teaching tool drop off during this section. I'm confident it's a post-production mistake because the narrator says things such as, "now that we have covered 'por' and 'para', or 'now that you know how to conjugate 'ir', which are both cover in Chapter 7. Furthermore, this practice section covers "Idioms using Tener". Again, this material isn't covered until Chapter 7.

Edit: In chapter 8, the track skips many times, like it’s an old school CD. It is distracting and actually makes you miss a few teaching points. Shameful.

So, what do you do?
If you've gone through the physical book and are only using this audio as a supplement to your studies, you can keep going because you should be fine with the miss. You'll still understand everything taught. This is what I will do.

If this is your first time through the audiobook, be sure to listen to Chapter 7 before doing the practice section that begins directly after Chapter 6. Once you return to the practice section you should be fine understanding all the material.

Conclusion
I'm confident I'm going to find many more errors because the audio program is a massive 59 hours! I get that it may have been hard to catch this but somebody got paid to mess this up and it may cost the author royalties if enough people fall off or never recommend this product. I love the physical book and highly recommend it as a self-paced learning program. However, it will be hard for me to recommend this audio book as a direct supplement until all the problems are fixed.

Review - 1/1/22 - Complete Spanish Step By Step

I have Ms. Bergstein's textbooks and they are terrific.

I purchased this companion audio from Amazon / Audible and during the 5th, 6th and 7th chapters the audio file begins to skip so that the listener (student) will have trouble discerning what is said in the audio -- especially during the quiz sequences.

I haven't listened to the complete audio which is about 50 hours in total, which I intend to do, but I hope that the technical people at Amazon / Audible listen to each chapter and find out what these glitches are and fix them. They occur more than a few times during the program.

Excellente!

I'm just beginning my Spanish journey and this audiobook is perfect. The content is great so far and Rachel Story's performance is stellar. Her voice is very pleasant and make listening a very enjoyable experience.

Very well organized

This is the best Spanish language learning book. Grammar rules explained clearly with chapters clearly identifying. different grammar focus. It is my go to book for learning and review.

Thanks for the Very long course

I really appreciate those who created this course. It must have taken a Long time and a lot of hard work and dedication-to-task. I learned more in this course, about grammar mostly, than I have been able to find in other “complete” courses. The readers were sweet and gentle. Thank you so much!

Satisfecho

Dear audiobook reader,
This material seems the best among many other languages sources available. I’ve tried many to quickly learn Spanish and end up this long course, so far having repeated five times, spending almost 300 hours. Now I could speak Spanish in public place. Thanks to Babara y Rachel!!!

where is the pdf?

so far so good but no pdf to see spelling, definition study or test myself.

Amazing book and have the fix for the skipping

I LOVE this book but the skipping is really bad. I tried redownloading, changing the type of download to high quality, changing the download into parts. THE FIX: You have to 1. delete the book from your library 2. LOGOUT of your account 3. LOGIN and redownload the book.
I ordered the book so that I could have a physical copy to read along with and do the tests on my own. I consider this to be one of the most important books in my library and highly recommend it. Having moved to South America to a country that speaks very little English, people are truly impressed with my speaking ability. Someone told me the other day that I sound natural and not like I learned from a book or an app. While this has not been my only source for learning, it seems to be the best at putting all of the pieces together and answering most of my questions.

Absolutely NO recording and listening problems!

The female performer is exquisitely wonderful! Speaks so clearly, friendly, supportively and correctly BOTH English and Spanish! I've completely fallen in love with her! The author's text is top-notch teaching. Explaining everything and encouraging the right amount of listener practice. It is very thorough and advances only after I master every step. The technical recording quality is perfect contrary to some surprising reviews. No mispronounced words. Well, ok, me personally, I just hate the Cuban guy. Badly recorded and equalized unprofessionally in my humble opinion. He pronounces so lazily and leaves out so many letters. Real street latin american, I doubt. Why he was chosen I wonder all the time. Fortunately I have to listen to him quite seldom. I so appreciate this audiobook.