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I have to be honest and say that I haven't played this game for more than an hour or two, but I have found the game to be monotonous and unclear. The whole game is based on a story of a young child who lets his friend play his brother's DS. The friend has to leave suddenly and jumps into a waiting car taking the DS with him. The child who is left behind worrying about his brother's DS gets his aunt to help him travel to Tiajuana and she insists that he needs to learn Spanish before he gets there. That leaves you in the begining stage of the game basically playing Hangman, a word search, and Memory. There are varying degrees of difficulty with each individual game, starting with words mostly in English and some Spanish leading up to words only in Spanish. The game obviously believes that you can learn Spanish only by rote and there is little thinking involved. The memory game is the silliest game because the objective is to match the pictures on the set of cards that you are presented with. At the top of the screen, every time that you flip over a card, a word either in English or Spanish appears. The picture on the card has no corrolation to the word and you end up just matching the cards by picture only. When you play the Hangman game you only have words in Spanish that you are trying to solve and no prior frame of referrence to help you. Since the game is played in stages and you get a map from the initial point you start at ending with the final point being Tiajuana, you obviously have to score a certain about of points before you can move beyond Memory, Hangman and the word search. I don't know about you, but I can only take so much of those three games and looking for the same words over and over is not my idea of a great time.Read full review
This game has nothing redeeming about it to recommend to others. As far as a language learning tool, it is crap! I really think it would be more effective to learn Japanese using only fortune-cookie fortunes than it would be to learn Spanish using this program! Activision should be embarrassed for taking people's money in exchange for this useless program, and it is clear almost immediately that they didn't bother consulting with language and/or teaching experts. For example, of the first 3 available games to new players, 2 of them don't provide English translations for the Spanish words!?! And, it should be clear to anybody that has ever learned anything that the game "Hangman" is not an effective way to learn a new language- especially when the randomly guessed Spanish word is never translated (for example- I used most of my 9 wrong guesses to come up with "Queso" and than had to use a paper dictionary to find out that that meant "cheese")! I also have "My Spanish Coach" and have used that extensively- it increases in difficulty as you progress through it, the lessons are arranged in a logical format which builds upon previously learned material, and each mini-game really serves to help you remember and assimilate new words into your functional vocabulary. "Spanish For Everybody" is nowhere near as good as "My Spanish Coach"....in fact, it is even less useful than the pile of stuff my neighbor's dog leaves on his lawn! I would trade this cartridge in, but I would feel too bad knowing that somebody else bought this garbage...I'll probably use it to balance a wobbly table, but other than that, I see no reason to even own this useless piece of garbage!Read full review
i decided to buy this game because i took spanish years ago and forgot a lot of it. It is an interesting game without really needing spanish skills to complete. It is about a boy who goes on a journey and needs to learn spanish to complete the trip, but the games used are not useful in retaining information. It has a matching game, a word search, hangman, which are all games that you don't really need to learn the meanings of the words to be able to advance to the next level. It's okay, entertaining, but not great.
This game is good for young learners. It allows them to see the english and spanish version of the words. I do like the conversion dictionary. The game gives them basic words that they can use. It doesn't allow for sentence formation. Nor does it give you the ability to put the word in gender or tense form. In the Finding Palabras game, once you find the word in english it gives it to you in spanish. However when you find the next word the last one disappears and that doesn't give you enough time to memorize/learn the translation. I do find a drawback in La Pinata, if you don't have a good spanish vocabulary you will have a hard time figuring out the words. Over all it is descent learning for young minds that want to informally start learning the spanish language.
I have not experienced the entire game as it is kind of hard to get into. However, I do not like that the games do not do much teaching. They all involve spelling/reading and there is no pronunciation example given. For example, there is a hangman type game in which all you have is blanks to fill in with no definition given until after you have guessed the letters correctly. So, for a beginner, it is quite frustrating because you are trying to come up with a Spanish word with no idea of the meaning, spelling, etc. My Spanish Word Coach is a much better option as it utilizes the DS microphone for pronunciation exercises & has a learning option in which it teaches vocabulary needed for the games which include word recognition as well as sentence building games and much more.
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