However, my ambivalence towards these tapes goes deeper. I expected something called »Speed Spanish« to be direct and fast paced, but the first 30 minutes of this tape wander almost aimlessly through the alphabet, days of the week, months, and tedious side explanations. The teacher rambles on in English at times, fills up too much space with admonitions to »stop the tape and practice if we need to« … and repeatedly counts up the number of sentences we can make by putting different nouns and verbs together. (Yes, we rather expected that … )
The second tape has an odd section into which a long repetion of the alphabet is spliced for no apparent reason (except, perhaps, manufacturing error). It later launches into a review of the text (though the teacher says he expects most people to be listening in the car) in which the English speaker reads a WHOLE conversation, followed by the translated conversation in Spanish, rather than going back and forth bit by bit.
Other pieces of strangeness include sections where the English teacher says a word twice, then the Spanish speaker says a word twice. Why would we need to hear the English word twice?
Finally, the tapes are manufactured so that the content runs out on the first side of each casette before the tape ends, meaning the tapes do not autoreverse properly. You have to either reverse the tape manually or fumble for the start of the second side with fast forward buttons.
This is the second Spanish tape I've tried (the other was from the library), and I'd say it is about equal to the first …