Speakshop Review: Learning Spanish Online

A few weeks ago, I passed along a tip to try the new website Speakshop in my Speakshop suggestion post.

Here's a video that gives a quick demonstration of Speakshop, made by another user:

My wife and I have now finally had a chance to try it.  Here is my short review.  

My wife and I both received free one-hour introductory lessons - not as any offer from the company to us in particular - this offer is currently available to all new users!  

We each signed up, chose our instructors from the avaialbe instructors (from Nicaragua and Guatemala), and picked a meeting time.  To be honest, I found the website interface to be slightly frustrating when I first signed up.  At first I thought I had been tricked about the free lesson and that the only free lesson was a written exercise.  But there really was a free lesson: I just had to earn the right to it by navigating the counter-intuitive website.

My wife and I each scheduled our lessons for a few days later, and we arrived on time for our lessons, as did our instructors.  My wife's Spanish is much less advanced than mine; she was nervous at first, but her instructor did a great job drawing her out and teaching her many new words.  My instructor and I talked about our experiences in Central America and about the political situation there.  I learned a few words, but she wasn't quite prepared with an "advanced topics" lesson so overall I felt a bit envious about how much my wife had been able to learn in just one hour.

In my lesson, I didn't have webcam set up properly - it's not a requirement.  We just used the microphone headset.  I did find that using skype gave us a slightly better quality conversation than their website, so my instructor and I switched quickly to the skype interface.  My wife and her instructor did the same thing, although they both used webcam.

I don't hesistate to recommend giving it a try.  What do you have to lose?

Have fun!