Mucho Spanish

On the positive side, "Mucho Spanish" is fun to use and does a particularly effective job at helping the student to hear how the language is spoken.

The system requirements of "Mucho Spanish" are reasonable. It runs on Windows 98 or later, or Mac OS 9 or later, with 128 MB RAM. A processor running or at least 600 MHz for Windows or 500 MHz for the Mac is recommended, although it tested fine on a Windows machine running at 475 MHz.

No installation of the program is required, so you can take it with you and run it on any machine that has QuickTime 6 installed.

On the negative side, navigating the program is a bit awkward at times, as clicking on the "menu" button takes you to the opening menu rather than an intermediate menu you might expect.

There are also a few instances where the Spanish text leaves off orthographic accents, such as spelling sé as se and qué as que. True, there is a tendency among some Spanish writers to leave off the written accents, but it's probably best for the person learning Spanish to use the standard spelling. There is also one case where el sacapuntas (pencil sharpener) is inexplicably written as el saca puntas. Although such mistakes are very few, there are nevertheless distracting from what otherwise is a fine product.