Learn in Your Car: Home & Garden, Spanish

By: Barbara Thuro

Narrated by: Penton Overseas Inc.

With so many programs that focus on travel vocabulary, Home & Garden Spanish offers a unique opportunity to enable language learners of all levels to explain and comprehend conversation about household activities, cooking, laundry, and child care, as well as all activities relating to garden care and maintenance.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2004 Barbara Thuro (P)2014 Penton Overseas, Inc.

GENERALLY GOOD, BUT COULD BE BETTER

Any additional comments?

This is a generally nice addition to the Learn-in-Your-Car series, although they could have done a better job with it.

On the plus side, there’s a lot of useful vocabulary relating to common everyday items inside and outside the home. In addition, there’s extensive use of Imperative verb forms, which are more common in Spanish than in English. There are also examples of Subjunctive verb forms as well as Reflexive verbs, and Direct and Indirect pronouns. Some examples are:

“Mueva los muebles cuando use la aspiradora” (Move the furniture when you vacuum)
“Guárdelas cuando estén secas.” (Put them away when they are dry)
“Asegúrese de que la plancha no esté demasiado caliente.” (Make sure the iron isn’t too hot)
“Haga que los niños me llamen cuando lleguen a casa.” (Have the children call me when they get home)
“Avíseme de cualquier línea de irrigación que esté rota.” (Tell me about any broken irrigation lines)

On the negative side, the pause between phrases is only a second or so. If you want to practice saying the Spanish aloud, you have to pause the recording, say the phrase, then restart the recording. This gets old pretty quickly.

The sentences are repeated twice. There are also lists of vocabulary words. These are repeated only once. Some of the vocabulary words are used in the sentences, but many are not.

There’s a PDF of all the sentences and vocabulary words, which you can download.

Here’s a summary of what you get:

435 Sentences – Repeated once in English and then twice in Spanish.
150 Special verbs relating to Home & Garden (there are also common verbs such as “decir”, “hablar”, “entender”, etc., which are used in the sentences, but are not listed in the Home & Garden Verb list.)
375 Home & Garden vocabulary words (in addition to the verbs)


Also, there is a list of 240 additional Garden vocabulary words. These are listed in the PDF, but do not appear in the audio recordings themselves.