Living Language Spanish: 2010 Day-to-Day Calendar

So far (mid February) the vast majority of the words of the day have been cognates. Examples: musica, guitarra, veterinario. Even if I had no knowledge of Spanish whatsoever, I think I could figure out these words. I am thus far very disappointed in this calendar. I wanted a quick easy way to add to my vocabulary each day, and this is not cutting it. Sure, the phrases that the words are used in often contain words I don't know, but those are rarely used as the word of the day. Example, from above - phrase is "Llevalo al veterinario" - translation "Take him to the veterinarian." Maybe it's just me, but I think it would have made a lot more sense to teach us the verb (take), rather than wasting a day on a word that is so ridiculously obvious that my three year old niece could have translated it. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but I won't be ordering a Living Language calendar again.

I purchased this to brush up on my Spanish vocabulary after not having studied in years. While I usually already know the word of the day, the sentence provided often includes a grammatical structure or word I either didn't know or had forgotten. The only downside I see is the pronunciations are sometimes exaggerated and don't sound correct.

I wouldn't recommend this for complete beginners, since the pronunciations are hit or miss and this really isn't structured learning. I tried this with the German version last year and could barely remember any of the words, let alone be able to use them in a sentence.