Welcome to the Destinos program! In this course, you will be studying from a sequence of television program, working with the audio, computer and print components of the course, participating in classes or several conversation sessions, and completing a series of tests, self-tests and worksheets in order to earn college credits.

Destinos is an innovative and highly effective system of learning Spanish that provides a planned immersion course in Spanish language and culture. Destinos adapts the format of the highly popular Hispanic "telenovela" (soap opera), and allows you to hear Spanish and experience its cultural diversity while following a compelling story full of human emotions, the surprises that real life often offers, and the force of the human spirit.

The students who view the episodes will not only follow the development of an engaging story, but will also experience via television the cultural richness of México, Spain, Argentina, Puerto Rico, and the Spanish-speaking areas in the United States. The result is a cultural portrait that you can identify with and believe in, and a teaching approach  that makes language-learning stimulating, absorbing, and fun.

Destinos is different from conventional language courses. Perhaps you have already studied a foreign language via another approach, and you may find the teaching approach of Destinos unusual. In order to know what you will expect from this course and what will be expected of you, you need to consider the following three principal characteristics of Destinos:

1. English is never used to express the meaning of words is Spanish. The objective of Destinos is to help you encounter Spanish language and culture from the inside, not through the distorting prism of your own language and culture. You may find it difficult at first, to make sense of Spanish without the crutch of English. However, the course will give you strategies for understanding Spanish without resorting to English, and the result will be a deeper understanding of real meaning, as well as a new perspective on your own language, culture and values.

2. The course immerses you in Spanish from the start. In each episode, there are three kinds of Spanish. Two of them are specifically designed to be comprehensible for the beginner: the Spanish spoken by an off-screen narrator, and that spoken by Raquel Rodríguez as she reviews the major highlights at the end of each episode. The purpose of this Spanish is to provide appropriate language for acquisition, that is, language that you can understand and from which you can learn. In addition to this purposefully comprehensible Spanish, each episode also contains segments of more rapid conversational Spanish, that is, when the characters are speaking to each other. In most cases, actions and context will allow you to follow this type of Spanish. You are encouraged to follow along, get the general idea, and let comprehension develop over time. You are not asked to study and learn this type of Spanish, although you will often pick up words and phrases repeated in conversation (or emphasized in particular scenes).
You will have no trouble achieving the minimum objectives of each  lesson. These objectives are clearly spelled out at the beginning of each study guide chapter. Building on this basic material, you can assimilate and use the larger amount of available language at whatever rate you choose. The distinction between passive recognition and active use is what allows Destinos to give you authentic Spanish from the start, rather than an artificial, simplified version  of the language.

3. You not only hear Spanish that you can understand; you also see Spanish that you understand, which further promotes language learning. In each lesson you learn to catch the drift of a great deal of language, but you are not expected to use more than a small amount of it at first. Out of the mass of Spanish presented, a small fraction is captured in the review segments that Raquel usually provides toward the end of each show. Raquel's views are accompanied by sentences on-screen that allow you to see how major grammatical features work.

 Destinos was developed with funding from the Annenberg/CPB Project. The project provides financial support to develop imaginative, academically rigorous course materials and to explore new applications of the electronic technologies. The goal of the project is to create opportunities for individuals who wish to acquire a high-quality college-level education. The television course premiered on public television in September 1992, and is locally available through ECC Channel and Channel 20 WTTW.