Hi Tim I have found the course helpful and fun. Being fun is an important part of learning for me. I also found it addictive, and could not stop till I got to the end! I had studied Spanish at night school before, so did know some grammar. However I think the way this system works is very like the way we learn to speak as children. I have found that now I am continuing with my studies, at Escuela de adultos and Universidad Popular in Spain it has helped ne to know if things sound right. Going to classes where no English is spoken I need to be able to work things out, in Spanish, and question in Spanish. This course has given me confidence. Thank you SSi Pauline
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Hi Tim,
Iām over halfway through level 2 in the Spanish course. I am embarrassed to say I have purchased maybe a thousand dollars of almost every course available on-line and this is the best one out there, in my opinion.
Aranās method replicates the way children learn language: lots of repetition, space for mimicry, opportunities for success as well as mistakes, and many more chances. The many iterations and different perspectives employed for the same theme expose you to grammar without boring you to tears or being too confusing ā you get accustomed to the syntax so you are conjugating less and getting the grammar right more.
The other courses fail because:
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They give you a pause and then move on, so you barely ever get another opportunity to have another go at it. Blink and itās over.
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They donāt give you an opportunity to try and put together complex sentences or ideas, or at least itās very rare. You just parrot and donāt have to actually stretch yourself at all.
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They do a lot of talking explaining things yet you hear very little Spanish and speak it even less.
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The Spanish you do hear is usually scripted dialogues, but how often is your situation going to follow a script?
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The courses seem geared for tourists or academics and not for meaningful social interaction.
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You are stuck in the present speaking very formally.
I canāt say enough wonderful things about SSI Spanish. It gives building blocks to assemble long strings of words into complex ideas and sentences, giving the tools to be well ahead as a Spanish-as-a-second -language speaker. And it gets you accustomed to using the appropriate tense for the thing you most likely will need right from the start.
I would suggest you go ahead and try some of the other courses out there like I did. Only then will you find how amazing this one is! There are a couple others which attempt to do what Aaron does, but less successfully. Returning to them I found the pace excruciatingly slow. Which isnāt a big deal if you have the majority of your life ahead of you, but is a huge deal when you think of just how much you need to master to become fluent in a second language.
The other thing to consider is, so what if you canāt memorize all the words because theyāre flying by so fast? It might be true youāve missed a lot of them and screwed up a lot of them. But itās also true that youāve probably learned a lot more than you thought you did, that you were exercising your mouth a lot, and hearing a lot of variations you will encounter in real life in a dynamic, real way. I also bet if you go back and review the first couple of lessons youāll be amazed how much you own it and how much mastery of it you have!
I donāt know how others use this program, but I only listen to it in my car. I never pause and I just ram through each session. If I find myself less successful than Iād hoped, or if there was a particularly problematic thing I just couldnāt nail, then I will repeat that challenge. I also found I was doing too much and that a break of a day or two every now and then repeating the previously finished challenge to be helpful.
One thing Iāll concede, though, is that the subtle ending sounds of some of the verbs youāll hear are more apparent to me because I saw them in past attempts through the older, dry and painful methods. So a little bit of print exposure to see those conjugations as patterns would definitely be helpful! Probably any ambiguity of the verb endings is solved with the videos. But as far as actually speaking and getting up to speed from zero is concerned, this is the best there is!
As a mom and a former teacher of English as a foreign language, who tore her hair out trying to reach her foreign students every day and explored many many methods, I will say that what sets this apart is the great abundance of comprehensible input, immediate exposure to the second language, and the opportunity to speak over and over again. How I wish I had been exposed to this method back when I was teaching!
Anyway, good luck to you! Stick with it!
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Oh my word - what a fantastic response! Leanne, thank you so very, very muchā¦ 
Would you mind if we quoted you in promotional material, as we carry on trying to figure out how to reach more Spanish learners? 
Por supuesto!
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I lived in Spain for twelve years and watched others struggling at Spanish courses, worrying about grammatical aspects, tenses, genders, and other issues, when I simply got on with speaking the language.
Other than immersing yourself in a language, by living where it is spoken and only using that language, as I was fortunate enough to be able to do, the Say Something In method is, for me, the far most effective way of learning a language. Donāt worry about the grammar or the exact word recognition, thatās not how one learns oneās native language: those aspects will come later.
You are most certainly not wasting your time.
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David - would you mind me quoting you on this? 
Quote away, Aran!
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Diolch o galon!