Reservist Wrote:Just to reply to the thread I took the clep, scored a 61 just below the 12 credit cutoff. My experience is as follows, high school Spanish 2 years (all was forgotten), then I lived in Puerto Rico for five years, tried many Spanish language programs including pimsleur, and a couple others. All of which I considered boring and worthless. Then I tried Rosetta Stone, it absolutely blows every other program out of the water, I combined that with a workbook entitled "Total Spanish grammar", and made every attempt to practice my Spanish with the locals. End result is I'm very confidently conversational, and can speak and think in Spanish fluently, I hesitate to say I'm totally "fluent" because I can still get caught missing something or saying something incorrectly or asking someone to explain something to me in a different way.

That being said I took the exam 1 year after leaving Puerto Rico, without any other preparation and found it very difficult. It's all listening exercises. So they will tell you a long drawn out story in Spanish and then ask you questions about minute details of the story, I found myself realizing I had to take notes on the stories just to remember the details, for example the month that Maria left for vacation was June. Also the accent I was unfamiliar with, so it made listening to the passages very tedious for me.

Just my experience, I think it would be difficult to pass on high school level Spanish alone.

Also regarding watching movies in Spanish, you've got to check out "Intacto" it's on Netflix, and an awesome thriller if you don't mind violence.