A short history of Spanish Whiz and StartSpanish
There are quite a few programs on the market to help you learn Spanish - a very different situation from when I first released Spanish Helper in 1994. I'd like to tell you the history of the Spanish Whiz and StartSpanish programs so that you can situate them among their competitors and hopefully make an intelligent choice about which program to buy to help you in your effort to learn Spanish. I know I'm biased, but I'll do my best to be honest and straight-forward. Who knows? You might even find the story interesting.
First of all, who am I to be bold enough to go around writing and promoting programs in the international arena? Well, I'm a person who was born in California and learned Spanish as a second language while getting my university degrees in the same subject in San Diego. Let me stress one thing: I didn't learn Spanish in my university classes - I learned it by traveling in Mexico and cultivating friendships with Spanish-speakers. I eventually learned it even better by meeting a girl from Spain in 1978 and then marrying her and moving to Spain to live. I spent a number of years teaching English to Spanish-speakers here in Spain, and since moving to the Mediterranean coast fifteen years ago where a large numbers of foreigners live, I've spent most of my professional life teaching Spanish to foreigners.
The oddity of a foreigner teaching Spanish to other foreigners in Spain never ceases to amaze me, but there are reasons why it's a good idea. The two main ones are the fact that I've learned Spanish as a second language myself, so I'm familiar with all of the hurdles (which most native teachers usually don't see) that students run into, plus the fact that I'm able to pass on part of the knowledge in the students' own language when they have questions. The proof that my system works is the fact that my students do become fluent in Spanish, and that is what counts.
In 1991 I discovered computers and two years later started learning how to program. I decided, as an exercise, to try making a little program where students could practice vocabulary from English to Spanish and vice-versa, and in 1994, Spanish Helper (a DOS program) was born.
Windows soon became popular so I recycled my programming skills by learning Windows programming and then, using the useful feedback that Spanish Helper customers had given me for four years, made and released Spanish Whiz in 1998. Other than sharing some of the common vocabulary, there is very little resemblance between the two programs. Spanish Whiz includes an immense selection of vocabulary (something frequently missing in other programs which strangely seem to value beautiful computer screens with pretty pictures over content), the ability to make your own word lists, practice in listening and pronunciation and it even gives you some time to have fun with games and jokes (300 of them) that are included with translations ( to turn the fun into a learning experience). In short, Spanish Helper grew up, shed its skin and Spanish Whiz appeared in its place.
Spanish Whiz gives you the opportunity to practice and learn large amounts of vocabulary - what is known as a "vocabulary building program" in the industry. I did make an effort to help people along with the nuts and bolts of Spanish by including a concise but fairly complete grammar summary in the help file, but still I felt something was missing. So here is how the next step came about:
After years of teaching Spanish, I had developed my own structured system for teaching the language with an emphasis on practical, conversational Spanish. Around 2000, the system seemed pretty much mature (I've only made slight modifications since then) and in 2003 it occurred to me that that was exactly what was missing in Spanish Whiz: a complete, guided system to help people through the language step by step.
So I sat down and did my best to put my classroom system into a computer program. I was fortunate to have the help of my students that year (all computer literate to varying degrees) to give me feedback and valuable suggestions. At the end of 1993, I released StartSpanish and it has become quite popular. It's aimed at beginners (or those with just a smattering of Spanish), but people have written telling me that it's helped them to quickly recover the Spanish that they did "when they were in school". Its basic design is to cover all of the grammatical points of conversational Spanish without overwhelming you with tons of vocabulary. It's focus is quite different from that of Spanish Whiz, and the two programs are designed to be complementary.
That's my side of the story. If you have any comments or questions, you can send me a message by clicking here.
