[SPX]

Yeah, that all makes sense, Rusty and holt.

I thought about checking the vocab, but there's one small problem with that, and that's that they throw a LOT of words at you in each lesson. In the promotional materials they say that by the end of the course you'll be "well on your way to a 10,000 word vocabulary," and while that sounds like an exaggeration it's clear that they want to drill as many words into your head as possible, so you kind of just have to roll with what they give you if you want to get through it all in a reasonable amount of time.

I don't think I'm going to worry about it too much. I know how to recognize and avoid the "th" accent on certain words and am hip to the vosotros pronoun, so I will not be fooled there, ha ha. Also, as you say, the grammar is otherwise pretty much the same.

Also, I'm kind of just happy to be going through an organized course that doesn't bore me to tears. They have text, audio, video, games, etc for each lesson, which is cool. So much of my learning has been so scattershot--I mean, I know the Spanish word for "extraterrestrials", but I don't know the word for "answer"--that this is a good change of pace.

It does seem like they'd warn you though regarding which version of the language the course specializes in, but I have seen more than once across multiple products that the vast majority of the time they really don't.