Customer Reviews

Adios, papa!/ Googbye, Father! (Leer en Espanol Level 1) (Spanish Edition)

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I bought this book for my boyfriend who just finished his first year of college Spanish. While I did not find the book that amazing myself (I am a Spanish teacher), my boyfriend LOVED it! There is a mystery in the book and beginning students must use their detective skills to not only figure out the story but also the tricky Spanish. While the book limits its vocabulary to accomodate intermediate students (two or three semesters worth of college classes), it does not limit the use of these words. For example, almost every immaginable meaning of the word "quedar" appears in this books. Students also have to use context clues for some verbs that may be tricky for first or second year students (My boyfriend enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out when "para" was a preposition and when it was the conjugated verb "parar", both of which occur frequently).

Perhaps more importantly, the book hands very little to the student reader. Many times the meaning of a sentence is implied. Students must read between the line to capture the meaning. This means that the intermediate reader is engaged at in higher level thinking skills and thus processes the new language more effectively. Also, the Spanish is as it would be used in real, spoken situations (virtually no artificial "beginner" language here). The one thing you SHOULD be aware of, however, is that the book is VERY "Spanish" (the lexicon and grammar reflects speech patterns in Spanish, so you are going to see a lot of "ha hecho" instead of "hizo" or "ha dicho" instead of "dijo", etc.)

Anyway, despite its difficulty, my boyfriend loved this book and learned a lot. He is now reading all in the series. I hope this review was helpful! :)