Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)After exploring quite a few different software applications offering Medical Spanish instruction, we chose this one as the primary offering in the new multimedia Medical Spanish language lab in our library next to a large urban hospital.
The product is VERY intuitive to use - we provide about a 5-minute tour demonstrating the features for new users, and to date have yet to have someone come back for more help. The twentysomethings relate very strongly to the product design and the words that keep coming from users are: 'this is so cool!'.
The 22 topics each have from 5-8 phrases to work with (141 phrases in all), so a single topic can be dealt with in from 30 minutes to an hour. Many of the phrases are diagnostic questions intended to elicit 'yes' or 'no' answers, so dependence on interpreting the spanish-language answers from actual patients is minimized.
This is definitely a tip-of-the-iceberg product when you consider the total problem of learning how to function as a health professional with actual patients. You will not learn here about tenses and gender, except incidentally. Persons completing the course will definitely want to move on to products with more depth in day-to-day conversation (our OB nurses report that most of the talk with patients centers around discussion of family, etc.), or with deeper and more extensive specialty vocabulary.
However, we found the product to be quite engaging for users and extremely helpful in practicing pronounciation skills. Practicing spanish with a virtual patient is a great way to 'break the ice' before attempting to communicate with actual patients.
We have yet to find anything else (though want to, badly) that has the interactive strength and ease of use of Virtual Conversations. We continue to feature it as an introductory 'grabber' product in our language lab.
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