Ouino Spanish Review

Ouino Spanish is a downloadable Spanish language software made by Ouino Languages. It is one of the better courses out there for making Spanish grammar easier to understand, but it also includes a variety of other tools in quite an appealing package for beginner to intermediate level Spanish learners.

The "Building Blocks" section is what I would consider the ‘main quest’ of the Ouino course. You could think of this as the grammar section, but Ouino considers the word "grammar" to be "rather difficult and boring".

When you click into the "Building Blocks" section you'll see a big, long screen filled with topics like "gender", "connection words", "personal pronouns", etc. Each topic is filled with small lessons, each focusing on just a tiny handful of new words or concepts.

This "bite sized" approach (and the way it's displayed on the screen) is surprisingly effective at making big, complicated topics feel really easy and manageable.  

Each "bite-sized" lesson has two parts. (This is true for all lessons inside Ouino as a rule.)

Lesson part 1: The information part

The first part is the "Lesson" — where Ouino tells you new things about the language. Mostly you'll just see lots of examples of the new language or construction in action, so you can start to understand the pattern just by seeing it over and over.

The new concepts are shown in the context of a full sentence, so you'll also pick up a lot of incidental vocabulary along the way.

(Don't worry about memorizing all the surrounding language though. You only need to focus on the target language, which will be highlighted in red.)

Compared to many other grammar courses (like Rocket Spanish), there's surprisingly little explanation here. But that's not a bad thing! Sometimes grammar courses are so heavy-handed with discussion that it feels like reading an instruction manual when you just want to use the thing!

With Ouino Spanish, your learning will mostly come by seeing all those examples. This makes it a more natural and tangible approach to learning new language patterns.

Occasionally there are some things that do need a little more explanation. When this is necessary, you'll get a little "tip" appear at the start of a lesson.

But there's a small problem with these...

... They're really dry and full of linguistic jargon. For a course that makes everything else so easy and accessible, the tips seem weirdly difficult, especially if this is your first time studying a second language. 

In the example above, it would make a world of difference if there were tooltip explanations and examples for "prepositions", "object pronouns", "subject pronouns", "singular first person and second person".  If you don't know what these are, this tip won't make any sense to you.

But that's a small gripe. If the "tips" fly right over your head — no big deal. They're not really essential. You might find it easier to come back to the tips later, after you have seen all the examples in the lesson.

Lesson part 2: The exercises

Every lesson in Ouino Spanish comes with a variety of exercises to reinforce the material you've learned during the lesson.

The lessons in the 'Building Blocks' section all follow the same format. They're generally cloze test activities where you need to fill in the gap with the new words from the lesson.

There are three levels of difficulty (all essentially testing the same thing): 

Just like it says on the box, the "Verbs and Congugation" section is a whole section devoted to exploring verbs from a variety of angles. It's either your dream or your nightmare.

(If it's your nightmare, jump down to the conversation section and forget about this for the moment! 😉 )

This is a fantastic section to dip into when you know you need to work on a particular aspect of your verb knowledge.

There are four main tools: 

• Key verbs: A weird name, but this is a collection of auxiliary verbs, like estar, ir, ser, poder, tener. You can study these in the present, past, and future/conditional.
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• Verb endings: Learn the patterns for common regular verbs, based on their verb endings. For each ending you can investigate how they change for different tenses and conjugations.
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• Express verbs: Another admittedly weird name for a tool that shows you how verbs change depending on the tense. E.g., present, preterite, imperfect, etc. You pick a tense you want to focus on, and you’ll see different examples of verbs in that particular tense. The examples will work through all the conjugations (I, you, he, she, they, etc) to show you how it works.
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• ‍Individual verbs: An alphabetical list of verbs in English, which you can dive into to see how it’s said in Spanish in a variety of conjugations, tenses and moods.
  

If you need a break from all the language-under-a-microscope stuff, you can take a breather with the conversations section of the course. 

Here you’ll find 61 text + audio conversation examples on a variety of themed topics, — mostly practical, everyday situations like buying something in a shop, making smalltalk about the weather, or ordering in a restaurant.

These are a good way to see Spanish in action in a more natural environment, and to passively expose yourself to Spanish syntax.

Emblazoned across these lessons is the warning that you'll see some examples of Spanish as it is commonly spoken, rather than the 100% grammatically perfect Spanish you'll get in the other lessons in the course. You're not going to get full-on street slang, but you'll at least start learning some of the common shortcuts that Spanish speakers take in everyday speech.

I found most of the conversations to be practical, rather than fun. They're modelling interactions that you might realistically have on a day-to-day basis, so there are a lot of useful phrases and vocabulary. But you'll still find the occasional giggle. I personally plan to use the phrase "I love noses" on a regular basis.

The Vocabulary section is the most straightforward section of the Ouino Spanish course: This is just a well-organized collection of vocabulary, based on a wide range of themes.

You'll get animals, numbers, time, question words, people, descriptions, household vocabulary, greetings — basically anything you can reasonably categorize. There is even a section for "fantasy creatures", "interjections", and concepts like "motivation".

Also inside this vocabulary section is a section on words and verbs that are similar in English and Spanish. (E.g., words that end in -ly in English often match with words that end -mente in Spanish: exactly / exactamente)

Each "rule" like this comes with a bunch of examples in Ouino, but you could easily apply it to even more words that you already know. This is an easy way to “learn” a whole glut of new Spanish words.

Activities for this section are straightforward: It starts off easy with two exercises where you hear a word, and you need to select the right picture. After that, there are two more activities where you have to write/spell the new vocabulary word to match the picture. The final activity introduces a time limit, which makes it quite challenging.

Working on your pronunciation using a home-study course (i.e., on your own) is always going to be a bit tricky. It's the kind of thing you really need another (Spanish-speaking) human to give you feedback and show you how to do it right.

But Ouino Spanish gives you some useful tools that will certainly help.

As in the rest of the course, Ouino have decided to break pronunciation down into itty bitty pieces, focusing on the pronunciation of different Spanish letters and letter combinations. 

They pay particular attention to the sounds that are different from English (these are yellow in the image below).

Inside each sound, you’ll get an explanation of the pronunciation, and a few examples. You can then record your own voice and compare it back to the voice model. 

There are pronunciations from both a male and female voice artist, but you can change this setting if you'd just like to hear the voice that sounds most similar to yours.

The pronunciation section itself only focuses on these single sounds / single words. But once you’ve mastered the sounds, you can take your new pronunciation for a hoon in the “extra language practice” section. There you'll find sentences of varying length with the voice-recording tool built-in. 

What? No automatic speech recognition?

A lot of Spanish courses use speech recognition AI in their pronunciation tools, but Ouino have purposely chosen this more low-fi approach, where the only thing checking your pronunciation is your own ears — comparing your pronunciation to the voice model. And to be honest, I think they've made the right choice.

Right at the moment, speech recognition technology isn’t good enough to help recognize poor pronunciation. (It’s designed to recognize what people are saying in spite of their poor pronunciation.) I see it as a bit of a gimmick that's not really effective at directly improving your pronunciation, but works indirectly because it encourages you to speak out loud more often.

If you're truly interested in improving your pronunciation, comparing your voice to a voice model (like you do in Ouino) is going to be more effective than using speech recognition.

Of course, it relies on your ears being able to hear the difference between "good" and "bad" pronunciation (which can be tough with sounds that don't exist in your first language). But even with your non-native ears, you'll still probably be a tougher critic than the speech recognition tool, and that's what you need.

An abundance of audio + genuine slow recordings

All word and phrase examples in Ouino Spanish are accompanied by audio. The audio comes in both “fast speed” and “slow speed”, and by default you'll hear both with every example. (You can change this in the settings.)

The slow speeds are  “genuine” slow versions — not just the normal speed slowed down digitally. The voice artists are actually enunciating every sound, slowly.  This means that you get to hear all the sounds properly, and you don't get that garbled melted sound of digitally-slowed audio. (I appreciate the extra work that has gone into this.)

'Extra Language Practice'

This "bonus" section of the course houses a large section of graded content to help you practice your four pillars of language learning: reading, writing, speaking and listening. There's everything from short sentences for pronunciation practice, all the way up to short stories for extensive reading.

This would be ideal to use once you've completed the Ouino course. The sheer abundance of content here means you could keep "playing" with Ouino for a long time.

Progress and achievements:

This is a section of the course where you'll find a range of tools and stats to keep track of your progress through the course — great for motivation. The calendar is an interesting tool: You can keep track of which types of activities you did on which days of the month, so you can see if you need to mix things up a bit.

Also worth noting: You can use the self-rating stars for every lesson of the course to show yourself how well you've grasped the material. (E.g., if you've found a lesson difficult, give it one star. If you aced it, give it four stars. )

This is a really quick and easy way to keep track of the lessons you need to do a bit more work on. I found myself using these quite a lot.

Ouino Spanish is available for laptop/desktop computers, phones and tablets (both iOS and Android).

For computer users, it's a little unusual because it's a downloaded software, rather than a web app. You don't use it by logging into a website... you have to download and install a hefty piece of software on your computer. But this actually has its upsides:

I spent most of my time with the computer version of the software, and I also had a play with the French version of the software on my 4-year-old iPhone. Despite my creaking technology, the phone app also worked smoothly (although it's a 1Gb download, so make sure you're on wifi!).

One niggle with the phone version is that the exercises could have been resized better for phone use. I don't have especially fat fingers, but I found myself mashing the wrong buttons and menu items on occasion. I haven't tried it on a tablet, but I imagine that would be much better.

Ouino Spanish is extremely reasonably priced, given that it's designed to take you all the way to intermediate proficiency. (Because it's a non-linear course, there is only one "level")

But first you have to make sense of the pricing. Ouino lists its prices as per-month prices, but they don't actually offer monthly pricing. All memberships are up-front payments for a set period of time.