|
I have never received this book. I emailed Amazon & Hungrybookworm last week but have not received a response. This item was charged to my credit card on April 14, 2009.Please advise me of what I should do.Sharon Schaap
I still have not received this book. The seller was very apologetic about the delay, stating that he had not received notice of the order. He offered a 25% discount on my cost. I am still waiting for both the product and the discount.
I learned Spanish as a self learner from Pimsleur and Learning Spanish like crazy. What I don't like is the CD ROM. I consider myself as a beginner in Spanish. This book provides clear explanations and interesting exercises. However this does not degrade the book itself. They are audio based only which is great, but after I completed those courses I felt I needed to work little bit more on my grammar. It uses challenging vocabulary not very difficult not very easy it just fits my level, so that I learn something new, but I am not stucked because I have to search for each word.
From some reason, the whole McGraw Hill CD ROM concept just does not work for me. But I found this book really great. It really sucks. Especially the tenses and verbs. By interesting I mean they are not boring I especially like short texts rather than individual sentences, the book uses both. I had other books from them with the CD ROM and it was the same. I am happy with my purchase.
On her recommendation, I started at the beginning, and have been working my way through the explanations and exercizes. My Spanish tutor here in Oaxaca recommended this book to me. I'm moderately proficient in Spanish, but mostly from having had the opportunity (and need) to speak it. I've found the presentation of grammatical points clear and easily understandable, with a minimum of grammatical jargon and good number of examples.The exercizes are certainly useful, since I've found that even if I understand a grammatical usage clearly, I need to practice it extensively if I'm going to use it when I'm actually talking with people in Spanish.My tutor pointed out that the exercizes could be better, especially for more advanced students, if they mixed different usages in the same exercize, rather than simply repeating the same type of sentence again and again. This would make the student think a bit more, and force him or her to recall previously learned forms.After working my way through the book, I agree with that criticism.Otherwise, I can warmly recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve his or her undertanding of and use of Spanish.
This book is a concise and well-organized review of the Spanish language. It guides you along but does not hold you hand, which is exactly what I wanted.The practice exercises are a nice way to drill the lessons into your head. You should definitely have some prior knowledge of Spanish before using this book. From the get-go, the book assumes that you either know a good chunk of Spanish vocabulary or that you are willing to research the vocabulary as you go. I did not even try to use the CD-ROM included, so I can't comment on it. It looks old anyway and I think it's just there to help sell the book.Definitely recommended highly for intermediate and advanced Spanish students who need a little boost.
|
