Best language learning program for my car

January 21, 2017 12:11 PM

My daily drive time is now up to three hours, I want to learn Spanish, can you recommend a system that will work?

I have looked at reviews of things like Rosetta, but I am not sure if it (the mobile option) would be useful to me as I want to do this while driving. I am motivated, but have not studied a foreign language for 25 years - and I was only fair at Russian after 7 years. I see a lot of options, but I need something I can do while driving with minimal interaction with my iPhone. I am fine with other components that I would do at home, but really want to do something with all that time beyond audio books.

I also have access to native speakers in my family and at work, so I will have lots of opportunities to practice outside of my car.

posted by cgk to Education (9 answers total)

Maybe something like Coffee Break Spanish while you're a beginner? Once you get a little more advanced, you could listen to news podcasts in slow & simpler Spanish for learners (I'm sure they must exist -- they exist for lots of other languages!) & then move up to podcasts or radio for native speakers.
posted by diffuse at 12:55 PM on January 21, 2017

Best answer: If your goal is to be conversational, check out Pimsleur. It's pretty old school -- audio only -- which is probably a good thing since you'll be driving.
posted by actionstations at 1:11 PM on January 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Seconding Pimsleur, but I wouldn't say it's old school at all.

Pimsleur pioneered the idea of spaced repetition in learning languages, and it's incredibly effective. I did German 1 in the car years ago and it's still with me today.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:39 PM on January 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

Thirding Pimsleur.
posted by caek at 1:52 PM on January 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

News in Slow Spanish podcast has been really helpful for me.

In my car I listened to Michel Thomas Spanish which focuses on cognate patterns. You very rapidly build up a vocabulary to words you recognize. (Though the accent isn't the best.)
posted by 26.2 at 2:04 PM on January 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

I'm a huge fan of audio reading and audio learning, but I couldn't deal with the weird background noises (mouth noises and poorly placed microphone artifacts) in the Michel Thomas Spanish recordings I tried.
posted by girl Mark at 3:43 PM on January 21, 2017

You could do the Foreign Service Institute's free audio-lingual Spanish Basic course. The meat of it is oral repetition and substitution drills. Comes in audio files of about 25 minutes length each. The brief accompanying grammatical explanations you'd read away from the wheel at home. I started my study of Spanish with the course; it's quite good for your getting the sound system and grammar fundamentals right.

¡Que tengas buena suerte!
posted by bertran at 10:22 PM on January 21, 2017

Nthing Pimsleur. Speaking from experience, it's perfect for driving around. There are sometimes little "reading sections" of a couple minutes at the end of a 30-minute lesson but just skip to the next lesson when those come up.
posted by Jacqueline at 10:04 AM on January 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. The consensus being Pimsleur I checked it out online and the files are downloading as I post this. I appreciate the suggestions!
posted by cgk at 5:06 PM on January 25, 2017