Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses Review

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(More customer reviews)This book and the other Practice-Makes-Perfect workbook by Dorothy Richmond ("Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions") are the best Spanish books I've ever used. I just got back from 2 years in the Peace Corps in Honduras and I studied these books every day. They REALLY helped me learn more Spanish! In addition to the concise, easy-to-understand instruction sections, there's tons of exercises to do (with the correct answers in the back of the book) and as I did the exercises, I picked up all kinds of things that I'd been wondering how to say. I also liked the verb workbook a lot because it went way beyond the present tense, all the way to the subjunctive uses of "haber" and other more advanced things I really wanted to know. (This book is especially great if you already know some Spanish because you need some vocabulary to do the exercises, unless you don't mind looking up lots of words in the dictionary.) I highly recommend this book!

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A workbook to help you master Spanish tenses

Some things just take a lot of practice to learn, and verb tenses are one of them! Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses goes beyond the scope of many other books that deal with verbs. Typical verb books often present little more than charts of conjugations with perhaps some mechanical exercises that do little to help you really master when and why a particular verb tense should be used.

Spanish Verb Tenses fills this void by offering clear, concise, and at times, humorous explanations that pinpoint why a certain tense works in a given situation. The hundreds of varied exercises offer the added plus of allowing for lots of practice.

The book is divided into three main parts: Part I deals exclusively with the present tense-including the conjugation of regular verbs, formation of questions, essential differences between ser and estar, use of the personal a, reflexive verbs, and the present progressive mood.Part II covers the other six tenses of the indicative mood: preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, present perfect, and past perfect.Part III presents the imperative and the subjunctive, aswell as the future perfect, conditional perfect, and the passive voice.

Two appendices complete the text-one lists verb conjugations, and the other highlights certain verbs and their corresponding prepositions. There are also two bilingual glossaries that define vocabulary introduced in the exercises.

As a companion to a basic text, as a review workbook, or as a reference source, Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses is an indispensable tool for all those who want to practice and perfect their use of Spanish verbs.

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Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course Review

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(More customer reviews)Reading is not a bad way to learn a romance language like Spanish. You can start by reading this book. Then you can hammer down what you've learned and build your vocabulary by reading Spanish-language books. (Amazon has numerous dual-language Spanish/English books.) Then you can go to Mexico to get practice speaking and listening.
The authors give thoughtful advice about how to use this book. Included in that advice is the recomendation that you spend eighty to one-hundred twenty hours mastering its contents. This advice proved useful to me. I was growing frustrated at one point. Then I reviewed my log of hours spent learning, and I discovered I was going way too fast. So I slowed down, reviewed carefully, and then I proceeded at a more realistic pace.
One thing. On page 109 there are two columns labeled "Indirect object" and "Direct object". These labels are reversed. You'd be able to figure that out on your own, but now you don't have to. (You're welcome.)
As a companion to this text, I used "Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses." Sometimes I needed a different perpective to understand a particular grammatical point. These two books articulate well. One gives you thoughtful, sophisticated readings and invites you to translate them into English; the other gives you English passages and invites you to translate them into Spanish. Practice makes Perfect goes into more detail on what it covers, but Spanish for Reading covers all the fundamental parts of speach, not just verbs (although of course verbs are eighty to eighty-five percent of learing Spanish).
For your eighty-to-one-hundred-twenty hours you get all the fundamental parts of speach for Spanish, plus about two thousand vocabulary words. The book contains numerous useful and interesting exercises. With the aid of a dictionary, you will be able to read right away after learning this book. When you have built up your vocabulary, you can throw away the dictionary.

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A unique approach to Spanish reading comprehension, Spanish for Reading can be used as a textbook supplement in classrooms or by anybody who is teaching himself Spanish. It begins by demonstrating similarities between words and parts of words in Spanish and English, and proceeds to offer practical instruction that will help readers broaden recognition of words and phrases. Each of the book's fifteen chapters concludes with a reading passage, the first of them quite easy to comprehend, and successive passages increasingly complex and sophisticated. Early passages are simple essays on Spain's and the Spanish-speaking world's language, geography, and culture. Later passages are excerpts from well-known works by world renowned Spanish writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Students who use this volume methodically will ultimately be reading and understanding these passages in their original, unedited Spanish, without need to seek outside help. Short of spending time in Spain or Latin America, here is as good an introduction to Spanish culture as a student will be able to find anywhere. Photos and line drawings.

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Spanish Verbs (Barron's Verbs) Review

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(More customer reviews)Please note that this is for the second edition of this book, copyright 2001. The previous edition says copyright 1990. I can't tell from the Amazon book page here if this is the first edition or second edition, but the cover design is slightly different from that displayed here from my copy, which I recently purchased, so I mention that just in case.
No matter what language you're learning (unless its Turkish, which has 100% regular verbs, or Japanese, which has only two), verbs are usually a major difficulty and stumbling block in learning a foreign language. This is the best compact verb book I've seen for Spanish. The pages VII to XL (7 to 40) in the introduction contain the best capsule grammar of verbs for Spanish I've seen, and is better than the ones I've seen in some of the bigger, beefier grammar books for quickly getting a good grasp of the basics as well as the more complex issues.
There are many features I like about this book, but one especially helpful thing the author does is to explain the formal grammatical names for the verb tenses, aspects, and moods and how they are formed in English, along with plenty of examples. For example, many of us have never thought of what the preterit or pluperfect is in English, but Kendris explains this along with many other useful things. Another nice feature is his discussion of how some verbs that express a mental state actually change meaning in the preterit. For example, the sentence, "Supe la verdad," means "I found out the truth." (Saber, which means to know, changes from "know" to "found" in the preterit). And the sentence "Pude hacerlo," means "I succeeded in doing it." (Poder, which means "to be able," means "succeeded" in the preterit).
Other features include extensive lists and coverage of irregular verbs, an index of 1000 verbs keyed to one of the models or patterns of the 300 main verbs in the text, an index of common irregular verbs identified by the infinitive, which allows you to look up which infinitive verb form it belongs to without knowing that initially, and an index of Spanish/English verbs. Each conjugation page contains at least a few examples at the bottom of the page of usages, such as in the Kendris's larger 501 Spanish Verbs book. Overall, an excellent little verb and grammar book for the student of Spanish, and considering the price is only 6 bucks and is over 300 pages long, a great value to boot.

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Approximately 300 most frequently used Spanish verbs are presented, one verb per page, arranged alphabetically, fully conjugated, and identified by the English infinitive form. Books in this series are smaller and shorter versions of Barron's 501 Verbs series. They make handy quick-reference sources for language students, teachers, and translators.

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Spanish for Dummies Review

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(More customer reviews)I like this book. A lot. It's one of my favorites for learning and reviewing bite sized pieces of Spanish.
I agree with the reviewer who said that it should not be used alone. Actually, what I am finding after trying to learn Spanish for business for about a year, is that there is NO single resource that can be used alone.
I travel a lot on business to various Spanish speaking countries and this is the book that I take along most often. It deserves a place in your Spanish-learning library.
My experience has been that to learn Spanish on your own, you need books, tapes, dictionaries, videos, Spanish TV, newspapers, PLUS you have to practice, practice, practice with native speakers. Every type of resource you can think of. If you want to learn quickly, move to a Spanish speaking country for a year and devote the year to learning Spanish. Otherwise, it will require persistence and patience.

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Spanish For Dummies is the fun and easy way to learn Spanish quickly and painlessly! Written by the experts at the renowned Berlitz school, this hands-on resource shows you the ins and outs of the Spanish language and culture, acting as both a guidebook and a reference. Soon you will have all the tools you need to:
Master the nuts and bolts of grammar
Greet others and introduce yourself
Get to know people with small talk
Order in restaurants
Shop anywhere
Go out on the town
Enjoy yourself with local recreation
Have a conversation on the phone
Work in an office and around the house
Ask for directions
Check in and out of a hotel
Use transportation
Call for help in an emergency

This guide features ways to start speaking Spanish quickly, as well as common expressions, important holidays, and phrases that'll make you sound fluent. Complete with an audio CD that allows you to hear actual Spanish conversations by native Spanish speakers, Spanish for Dummies is the ultimate guide for speaking Spanish quick and easy!
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

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Spanish Idioms (Barron's Foreign Language Guides: Idiom Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is THE BOOK to consult when it comes to Spanish idioms. It is the best among all others. The book is very well organized; alphabetically, guide words appear at the top of the page and for each word, there is an English translation and after that appear idioms that contain that word. There is an English translation for each idiom, and each idiom is used in a Spanish sentence, which is also then translated in English. At the end there is a list of common English idioms, with a Spanish equivalent and the page where it is found. It is a steal!

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Idiomatic speech undergoes constant change in all languages. Updated to reflect current informal written and spoken expressions in Spanish, this pocket-size book presents approximately 2,000 idiomatic Spanish expressions, followed up with their English translations and meanings.

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Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions (Barron's Foreign Language Guides) Review

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(More customer reviews)This resource is excellent. It clearly explains prepositions and pronouns as well as verb tenses. The exercises are practical and the answers are provided. Highly recommended!

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The author of this helpful book asserts that "Once you have mastered the Spanish pronoun system, your Spanish will be much more fluent and . . . you may engage freely in conversations in Spanish." Following a clear, step-by-step process, he explains correct Spanish use of every kind of pronoun and preposition. In the Pronoun section, he discusses interrogative pronouns, subject pronouns, prepositional pronouns, direct and indirect object pronouns, reflexive pronouns and uses of "se," possessive and demonstrative pronouns, adjectives as pronouns, and relative pronouns. In the Prepositions section, he describes Spanish prepositions and their usage, distinguishes between the uses of "por" and "para," and explains the uses of prepositions with verbs and adjectives. The book also includes review questions with answers, an English-Spanish vocabulary list, and a summary review of regular, irregular, and reflexive verb conjugations. Here is a fine supplementary reference guide for students of intermediate Spanish.

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