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 Good product for the price Mar 17, 2009
I have used Rosetta stone level 2 and 3, actually, going through it twice. And my son is using level 1. Rosetta is probably best for beginners. While Instant Immersion probably best for folks who already advanced in their learning. I bought an "open box" version for really cheap, so it was well worth the price.
The included spanish dictionary is a good compliment for ANY spanish learning software, as you can use CTRL, Shift, C to activate it, and it helps you with what ever program you are using. The dictionary also includes numerous examples to fortify your spanish skill.
The program is a little confusing at first, but you can undestand and navigate it better with use. The plus for advanced user is that they speak at a fast native speaker rate, which is challenging to comprehend, but is likely what you will face in real life. This causes you to think and piece together the language better. The speech recognition drills are very good, better than rosetta stone - if one desire to be phonetically accurate.
However, I just simply want to expand my vocaburary and comprehension, so I am just pushing the conversational drills. For the price, it is well worth it. If you are an absolute beginner and can afford to sink $200 or more for rosetta stone, make sure you use it in conjunction with a book, a class, or the VisED spanish grammar cards. I would recommend this program for intermediate and advanced student only.
The program comes in 3 disc - to use them randomly, you'd have to insert each separately. I loaded all 3 (actually 4) discs on to my hard drive as disc images, and jump between the levels at will.
 Get a better product Jan 15, 2009
Well, to be fair, I didn't get the version I was offered. This is for the 'Deluxe' version and I received the standard. The standard is pretty horrible, It looks like it was made in the early 90's and needs a significantly improved interface. Also, everything is pronounced with the Castillian lisp, that can get incredibly annoying if you're used to Spanish from Latin America instead. Make sure you're getting a more modern product and that they actually send you the 'Deluxe' version. It's worth it
 Instant Immersion similar to Rosetta Stone Jan 09, 2009
I tried out this product to keep up with my spanish inbetween semesters and found it's very easy to use. It's set up similarly to Rosetta Stone, same type of lessons. While it may not be as extensive as Rosetta Stone, it's a good alternative purchase for beginners or for people who don't want to dish out $300 to try to learn a language. They have similar principals. I recommend this product!
 Good thing it's cheap Dec 22, 2008
The obvious comparison here is to Rosetta Stone, and you can tell the quality of the products is going to be vastly different because of the prices they can charge. The most obvious flaw I see with this is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of "lesson" section. It's more like a series of games, and tests where you are just kind of expected to know what the heck it is you are doing. In Rosetta Stone the picture word association are made and then you have to remember them. Here they just show ya a picture and you have to guess. It's not completely useless, but this product can only really be used to supplement another method of learning the language.
4 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Unspeakably BAD. May 06, 2008
I am reviewing version 2.0 of this package, but I am sure that many of the same problems are present in version 3.0. I certainly would not even think of buying version 3.0 to see if it has improved. In addition, I am specifically reviewing the "Talk To Me" series of discs and the included Spanish-English dictionary software. I am not reviewing the audio CDs, in part because I haven't really made use of them, and in part because, no matter how good they might be, they simply cannot save the 1-star rating I must give this package. The software is the star of the show anyway, right?
And boy is the software terrible. The only reason I could make any use of it at all is that I already know a good deal of basic Spanish. If you do not know any Spanish yet, this product will NOT help you in the least. There are NO vocabulary or grammar explanations. The only way you can learn is by watching/listening to the dialogue (and optionally asking for translations) and doing really, really lame activities like crossword puzzles and word searches that won't teach you anything at all. That might not sound so bad if the questions for these puzzles were questions phrased in Spanish, but unfortunately it's much more inane than that: the word is simply read aloud and you have to type it in or find it in the word search. Nothing to it. Yawn.
In addition, the translations can sometimes be misleading, although I don't think this actually happens very often. For example, "¿Qué te parece si nos tratamos de tú?" is translated as "How about if we call each other by our first names?" This would be a fine translation if you were translating a book, but it's not a very good translation for a lesson, because the sentence has nothing at all to do with first names. The sentence actually means, "How about we call each other 'tú'"? That is, "How about we address each other using the informal pronoun?" Of course, the program never discusses the distinction between formal and informal speech in the first place, and it would be impossible for a student to pick up on it merely through this "immersion" method.
And that's the fundamental flaw of the software. Immersion doesn't work... not like this. You can't learn Spanish solely by watching TV in Spanish, and neither can you learn it just by interacting with a program in Spanish. If you want to learn by immersion, you still need the fundamentals, fundamentals which are sorely lacking here.
A big part of the software is speech recognition. This is one of the better parts of the software, since every language learner needs to practice speech, and a computer is a good way to practice speech if there are no native speakers around. After all, you can't really practice speech well with a book, and with a CD you can't proceed at your own pace. And the computer can listen to you and tell you if you're pronouncing it right! Well... almost. It's terrible at it. It will very often accept very bad pronunciations -- even deliberate and obvious ones -- and sometimes reject good ones. There are occasional (thankfully rare) sentences where it's almost IMPOSSIBLE to get the computer to accept your sentence, no matter if you're saying it exactly the same as the original, to the point that I wonder if they adequately tested every sentence.
Getting a score of "100% complete, 100% correct" is tricky, too. There are these dialogue sections that take the form of multiple-choice questions where none of the answers are right or wrong, they just give the product some semblance of interactivity. That's OK, although, again, it's rather useless unless you can already understand what they're saying. The problem is that sometimes the conversation takes slightly different paths depending on your answers, so you have to go back and find the parts you might have missed. That's pointless and annoying. Nevertheless, I did make it to 100% complete and correct on the Beginner Spanish CD. I popped in the Intermediate CD and prayed that it's better. It's not. It's exactly the same, just with different lessons.
In short, there is nothing the program gets right. Nothing. I think I've only bothered with it as long as I have because, apparently, I am masochistic.
And, as everybody else has complained, yes, the box has a map of Mexico on the cover, while the Talk To Me program is entirely European Spanish. Of course, European Spanish isn't so different that it wouldn't be useful in Latin America, but it sucks that the dialect is misrepresented this way.
The dictionary itself is decent, but nothing remarkable. However, the dictionary's software is horrible and I can say without exaggeration that I could have written a better program myself. There are all sorts of problems such as occasional dead-end links, links that don't go quite where they should, and so on. There are quirks such as, if you type a word incompletely and then pause, it will try to look it up anyway, which I usually find disruptive. It seems that they didn't do their homework, either, since the software proudly displays it's a "Español-Inglès" dictionary on the toolbar. The problem is that it should be "inglés", not "inglès"; Spanish doesn't even use grave accents. Although that is a minor quibble and doesn't hinder the program's usefulness, I think it perfectly exemplifies the sort of incompetence that is displayed here. View the dictionary software as the small bonus that it is. There are free dictionaries online that are almost as good anyway.
I've written a lot, probably too much, in this review. But it can all be summarized in one word:
Avoid.
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