Easy Spanish Platinum is good for learning Spanish quickly and on a budget. There are tons of lessons and activities for all learning levels. The trade-off for its low price, however, is a clunky and hard-to-navigate interface. For this reason, it doesn't make our list of the best learn Spanish software programs.
This was one of the hardest programs to download and install of all the software we tested. We cancelled the download twice because of missing or corrupt files, and when we finally got it installed properly, it crashed more than once mid-lesson. The download problems could be an isolated incident or the result of an inconsistent WiFi signal in our test lab. However, we checked user forums and product reviews on Amazon, and crashing seems to be a common problem.
Easy Spanish Platinum includes a wide variety of content, such as reading, grammar, writing, vocabulary, conversation, pronunciation and cultural lessons. Some of the lessons, like the writing portions, come in small doses, so you can take them during short breaks at work.
This is one of the only products we tested that doesn’t have a companion mobile app. As such, you must use a laptop or desktop computer or download MP3s onto a music player or your phone to learn with this program.
There are plenty of games, such as Go Fish, crossword puzzles and fill-in-the-blank activities, to keep you interested in the lessons. Each game pairs with the lesson content to make reviewing material a bit more fun.
Easy Spanish Platinum has a speech-analysis tool that records you saying a word, then compares you pronunciation to a native speaker to help you perfect your accent. During testing, we purposely mispronounced words and found the tool fairly accurate. It isn’t as accurate as the speech-recognition tools in programs like Rosetta Stone Spanish or Duolingo Spanish, but it is still valuable.
Most of the video content in this program teaches you about the cultural history of Latin America. The videos are short history lessons, narrated in English. There are also diagrams that illustrate the correct movement of the mouth, lips and tongue to help your pronunciation. The videos and diagrams have valuable information, but sadly, they look and sound as antiquated as the rest of the program.
You can purchase a perpetual license for Easy Spanish Platinum for less than $30. If you can look past the outdated interface and robotic-sounding dictation, there’s a good amount of useable lesson material.
