Basic Spanish 1: Getting Started

Let's be honest. You get what you pay for. I paid $0.00 to audit the course, so I am appreciative of the free instruction. With that being said, let's be a little critical of what is being offered and why I wouldn't pay $40 dollars for the certificate.

The interface is highly outdated, with some of the drag-and-drop exercises being quite ridiculous to land on the correct spot. The UI could use a huge overhaul, but perhaps this is EdX to blame, not the course itself. But also in regards to some of the exercises--the one with the rooms especially was annoying. The awful "diagram" of the room made it difficult to figure out which room was which without putting a lot of time studying it. When I'm trying to learn a new language, the last thing I want to get bogged down with is trying to figure out a cryptic diagram.

Now for the positives. People complained about the speed of the speakers, but most of the time I was speeding up the videos, not slowing them down. I believe the gentleman did talk faster than most of the other teachers, but you could always slow this down.

The material I felt for a beginning course was good as it mixed both difficult and easy concepts together well. It is hard to balance immersing one in a new language without going too fast or too slow and I think the course balanced this well.

So overall, I think 3 stars is fair, but in order to want to pay for this class, I would think it would need to be updated to 2020. It felt like taking Spanish 1 again when I did back in High School (which was 15 years ago).

If they could incorporate (once again, this could just be EdX to blame, not the class itself) a better UI, with more modern features (maybe use React or something?), I think it would be a really solid course. Maybe take a look at Duolingo's programming, and use some of the drag and drop/hover coding that they use.

I love this course. I am always interested in learning new languages since it leads me to comprehend different cultures. Since this course is the foundation, there is nothing too difficult to learn and understand by myself. The course structure is easy to follow up, either for the language learning process or psychological and logical thinking, and it is easy to browse and go back to specific weeks/lessons if I just happen to forget it. I have only two little issues with this course. First, some instructors lecture very fast (in Spanish normal pace); it is a bit difficult for me to catch their accent since my ears were not trained to understand it easily. I had to listen to videos many times to grasp correct Spanish words. Second, I always had a problem with the Speaking Lab (I learnt via Google Chrome). When I completed any speaking exercise (many many times), the system would not recognise my completion and just untick my lesson. I had to go back and forth between the Speaking Lab and its adjacent pages 5-20+ times until it recognised my activities. For others, all were good.

This is a really great foundational course for anyone serious about learning the language. I spent 4.5 years learning Spanish in high school and college, but I never kept up with it. This class helped me start from the beginning and make sure I have a solid foundation to work off of independently. I was able to complete it in under a week because it was just a review for me.

The one thing I will say about learning the language in general is that there are so many different dialects that you almost need to know what population you want to use it with. Tuteo, voseo, and usted ("you" forms) are really confusing because there are so many different uses throughout Spain and Latin America. There are also some very different vocabulary used. For example, I learned a verb in school that is used casually in Spain that I recently discovered is a curse word in Latin America. Most classes choose to focus on a dialect from Spain first since the language originated from there, but the dialect spoken most frequently in the States is Mexican Spanish. Just a thought/frustration to throw out there! I wish there were a class available dedicated solely to this topic, or one for those who wish to learn more Latin American Spanish, or simply that the differentiation was made more clear between vocabulary in these classes. This class did discuss some of them briefly. I am sure that this will be a similar issue for any new widely-used language though.

Thank you for making this course available on EdX!

Ola,
I absolutely love the teaching pace and options for lesson repeat. The course had great content that covers all the basics. Where I didn't know a word of Spanish before, I was conversing with my colleagues from Mexico after three months of the class! I have gone on to take the basic II to strengthen my learning.

What I hope to see improved is the technology around the course. Sometimes I can't read well on the mobile phone version and can't play the video clips. This limits my learning time. A better content editorial is also required. Sometimes, the correct answer choices are marked as the wrong answer! that can be confusing.

Gracias para la oportunidad aprender el espanol
Me llamo Amina
April 03, 2019

I really enjoyed this course overall.

However, as someone who has never taken Spanish I do think they could pay more attention to the expanded vocabulary they use in presenting the lectures. Only in the Week's recap do you see the meaning of all the Spanish words used to explain/ show what work needs to be done...I managed to complete most of the work but mostly based on common sense of what the looks like and therefore requires... This is especially true as from Week 3 onwards...

I also found the playback recordings are very buggy, the slow down feature doesn't always work, and they should've given more time before starting to record and speaking as it has cut off some of the words.

The good parts of this course would be how interactive it is and its easy content. The recap sections at the end of each week will be my go to for studying and practicing until I have it ingrained before commencing with their second and third course.

Conclusion: this course coupled with Span!ishD!ct and Duolingo is my saving grace to learning Spanish.

Grande Gracias!

I liked the interactive quizzes, but the course overall did not extend my existing knowledge of Spanish other than to reinforce that I can read Spanish better than hear and understand Spanish. All of the audio based exercises (e.g., listen to the recorded version and record yourself repeating the content) only gave error messages no matter how I tried to access the pages. The videos of people having a conversation for a few seconds were not very insightful, though the longer, explanatory videos were helpful. I didn't see the point of the "discussion" sections since they were not graded or used to really extend the lesson. Overall, I would not recommend this course unless you need a certificate to prove you tried to learn Spanish in a structured, online course. YouTube and Duolingo are better options to learn and practice Spanish.