Review Details

Punto y Coma (Exclusive 1-Year + Free Electronic Spanish-English Dictionary Bookmark Offer)

Product Review (submitted on 30 September 2013):

Listening is the hardest skill to pick up when learning a language. You can speak and write at your own speed, making the best of your resources; and, as with reading, can pause and use a dictionary if need be. But with listening, you are at the mercy of native speed, idiosyncrasies, elisions, local accents and so on.

This until you have nailed the elusive words / phrases that have prevented your understanding of a whole passage. It attunes you to the rhythms of the language.

Beyond this, Puntoycoma classifies items by difficulty, it includes translations of some words in a glossary on most pages, and it has fairly rigorous exercises to test comprehension of text and understanding of grammar and vocabulary.

If your knowledge of the language is advanced, Puntoycoma is still for you: it presents the reader with a range of genuinely interesting, varied and up-to-date insights from Spanish-speaking countries. Travel, health, literature, society, history are all aired in items that are not linguistically watered down for a foreign audience. There are plenty of pointers to websites and to other reading where you can follow up on topics of interest. There is a page on contemporary language usage (slang?) and a section on grammar.

The format, both audio and visual, is distinctly user-friendly. The magazine has pictures and the CD has brief musical links, both of which help you ‘navigate’.

The beauty of this resource is that there are so many ways to approach it, depending on your proficiency. You can train your ear, drill your grammar, lift out phrases to learn, or simply settle down to update your knowledge of the culture of the Spanish speaking world. Whichever ‘way in’ you choose, the other benefits accrue.

Ian Blaikie, (ex Head of Modern Languages, Warley High School, West Midlands.)