About my learning: I spent two more days at my parents' than I had expected, which means I couldn't finish the unit of Método 3, because I didn't have the workbook with me.
I am excited about this book series and hope a disappointment won't follow. It looks modern with those tons of photos and stuff, the publisher didn't want to risk the book looking unattractive, but they didn't overdo it. It is still well balanced, there are tons of content! I really think the Spanish teaching industry has been working on improvements intensively, while the French one has been sleeping, too sure of their supposed superiority.
Every unit starts with a list "Necesitamos aprender" and "Para", to give the student an idea of what is going on. The pictures and photos are quite nice and illustrative, not just place fillers (at least vast majority of them). The unit is divided in sections with various names (contextos, observa, practica,....) but that is not that important for the learner. The important thing is each exercise having several parts. You start from observation, reading, or listening, and progress through two or three tasks, usually resulting in some writing or speaking prompts. This is something I need. Writing prompts, based on some leads to follow (the general "write something about your city" kind of tasks are horrible, just like "tell me something about yourself" or "say something in Italian" questions by random people
). Those exercises allow me to practice and also leave my comfort space a bit. There are Gramática y léxico overviews, which are not bad, even though they seem not to include all the points covered in the unit (so my own overview in the notebook required going through it all again. that is a good thing. But just reviewing from the book after a longer time would be harder due to this). But I suppose the workbook contains majority of the related exercises on the grammar and vocabulary, so it is too early to judge. When it comes to comprehension, the book is too easy for me, but there may still be some bits to draw from it, mostly to turn them from passive to active skill.
The first unit is a review of the past tenses, which is very useful to me. I need to reinforce this, even though I am less horrible than I had feared. I've already written over 200 words, and I have not even answered all the questions. An example story amused me, it was a fable I hadn't heard before. There are other kinds of exercises, like filling the gaps, which precede the more creative ones, which is a good thing. However, I still believe adding translation exercises from a different source will be extremely beneficial to me.
edit:an ugly mistake
