Travel Talk Spanish

I remember several luckless teachers trying to hammer a foreign language into my brain. I found the lessons boring, but perhaps if they'd had a teaching aid like Travel Talk, I might now be sitting under the Spanish sun writing this review - or even in a French chÅteau, as this course is available for that language too. It comes on two CD-ROMs with a slim User's Guide and a pocket-sized Phrase Book.

Travel Talk's interface puts you in a 'virtual language school' where you're greeted by your tutor, who explains what you can expect in the course. After signing in and meeting other virtual pupils, you can choose to go to The Language Studio, the Travel Lab or the Game Room.

The Language Studio lets you experience 20 practical travel situations, the kind you might experience at airports, restaurants and hotels. Each lesson is divided into three parts. Orientation teaches you the words and phrases you'd expect to encounter in the given situation. You see both Spanish and English on screen. You can hear the words pronounced as often as you like and you can practise speaking them into your microphone. Thanks to voice recognition technology, a 'pronunciation gauge' measures how well you pronounce the words and you can keep practising until you get it right.

The next stage in each lesson is to watch and listen to conversations between people in real-life situations. They use the words you've learned. You can slow the speech if you need to, and you can choose to display the dialog text in English, in Spanish or not at all. In the last part of each lesson you look at pictures and speak the name of the object or concept illustrated. The lessons can be taken at your own pace and you have the freedom to jump from situation to situation at will.

The Travel Lab takes you through simulated travel experiences: you hold conversations with on-screen characters. The course of each parley is dictated by your responses, so that you can have many different chats in each simulation. There are also some slide shows of cultural and travel information in this room.

There are three activities in the Game Room. Conquest is a strategy game where you must speak an object's name to take your turn. In Video Match you must pair conversational video clips taken from Language Studio situations. The Music International jukebox lets you sing along while reading the Spanish lyric and, optionally, the English translation, if you fancy a bit of international karaoke at your PC.

Aimed at the business and pleasure traveller, this product really makes learning fun, and I found I picked up some basic conversational skills remarkably easily. Now I just have to decide where to go for my next holiday - Majorca or South America.

Author: Steve Cotterell