We have not used The Easy Spanish, but my daughter used The Easy French last year (she was 10 yrs at the time). It was pure torture for her to use and for me to prepare. It claims that it can be used by many age levels, including independent learners (which was the route my daughter took). In my opinion it isn’t particularly useful for any level. There were many activities, but they were all for very young learners (and many as Bookwork pointed out are silly.) For the older levels there is an “Independent Learner” section for each chapter. It basically containned the same verbage every single week repeated over and over again, and occasionally there was something unique for the lesson. (Such as copy this verb chart into your notebook -not very helpful in my opinion.) Even though the cost is fairly high you still have to print out the student pages, etc. from a CD (which was a huge pain). Overall I felt that it was poorly organized and difficult to use. We made it just over half the year and gave up.
The only thing I liked it about the program was that it included some cultural references. For example it included idioms and french sayings that you probably wouldn’t find in most other programs. It also had suggestions to further research a French artist, city, or historical monument.
I wish I could give you a better alternative, but I have yet to find anything! If anyone has any tried and true suggestions I’d love to hear about them!
