Customer Reviews

Complete Idiot's Guide to Intermediate Spanish

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This is THE best book about Spanish that I have ever read. I had already studied basic Spanish, but was pretty rusty. I couldn't put the book down! The author, Steven R. Hawson, has explained things in the clearest way that I have ever read. And, the book is also humorous. I highly recommend it to eveyone. I've never learned more Spanish. I also am learing a lot on my second reading. A great buy!

Here is a Spanish book that will actually teach you Spanish, real Spanish as it is spoken and written throughout Latin America and Spain. With humor and insight the book guides yuo through many of the knotty aspects of Spanish grammar and usage, all the while letting you test and grow your skills. The author makes excellent recommendations for other materials you can use once you finish this book (or at the same time), and offers plenty of useful tidbits about Latino culture, history, and society. An excellent way to improve your Spanish, and a useful review if you already know a lot.

I have never thought of myself as stupid enough to buy a "Complete Idiot's Guide" before, but I am SO glad I bought this. This book assumes some prior knowledge of Spanish, because it is an intermediate level... but with this one resource I have learned a lot of useful things, more than *ANY* other book or program.

I have bought about 10 spanish books, and this is by far the best one, and the most easy to use & follow. A note about the way it is written: each chapter uses a passage written in spanish (a few paragraphs), and they each progressively introduce more spanish. The text is disected, in the pages that follow. I think this is an EXCELLENT way to introduce you to more complex spanish, by providing you with short, interesting facts about the Geography & Culture of spanish speaking countries. Compared to my other 10 books, this one is unique in that respect.

I like the way that grammatical terms were explained... the tenses such as indicative, preterite, conditional, subjunctive, etc... and certain types of words such as demonstratives, pronouns, adverbs, superlatives, etc. *Finally* someone explained it well assuming no prior knowledge of all these abstract language terms. OK I already knew what a verbs, adjectives and nouns were. THANKYOU SO MUCH STEVEN HAWSON!! This was taught very poorly during my schools days.... and you have helped me to learn English better as well!! The rest of you: PLEASE don't be put off by this section of my review.

As well as this, there are also MANY other shortcuts & other useful information. Such as the use of "ser vs estar", "preterite vs imperfect" (I particularly like the way these two were explained) and "por vs para" --- although I think that "por vs para" could have been explained a slightly better - because I already seemed to work it out the rules for myself with the help of spanish natives. Everything else was explained **exceptionally** well.

This is quite a big book, and as I have said, it contains a lot of helpful information; however the chapters are short & it is easy to read & progress through. Learning a language is not an easy task... this book comes the closest to explaining things in an easy-to-understand manner. It is funny too - that alone makes you want to keep reading.

I think of language learning as fitting all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together; no two people would fit those pieces together in exactly the same sequence, and everyone proceeds at different rates (and some people may never even finish the entire puzzle), but eventually -given enough time & patience- another person can recognise the picture even though there may still be some gaps. You can think of "effective communication" as being able to "recognise the picture in the puzzle" in my metaphor. Well, this one single book has allowed me to fill in the most number of puzzle pieces.

Put another way: I have five highlighters: pink, orange, yellow, green and blue. I reckon by the time I get to the end, the fluoro ink in every one of them will be at least partially dry.
Yes I am only half-way through, but if someone steals the rest of my book, I still think that the first half is worth every single cent.

I bought this book to help me practice my spanish over the summer while school was out of session. I was surprised by how helpful it really was. It went back and explained some things I had already been introduced to but still remained confused about (such as how to know where to put accent marks). I also used it to preview topics once school resumed and as a review before tests. It was very straight forward and extremely helpful. The best thing about it is that it is not a one read book! Every time you read it, you find something that did not make sense the first time you read it, but is easier to understand now. Or in the case of students, you may read it the first time and not understand some concept that has not been introduced in class, but after you are introduced to it in class you can read the book and get some tips on better understanding the concept. Totally awesome book and I hope they come out with a Complete idiot's guide to advanced spanish! Worth every cent!

This book covers culture, as well as the language. a benefit to anyone trying to get re-familiarize themselves or improve on what they think they know.

The layout of the book is nice: each chapter begins with a reading and analysis of the text and then continues with further grammatical explanations and cultural notes. For someone who just wants to review the basics of Spanish for informal use, this book is probably sufficient. However, it is filled with too many errors to be of much help to someone who wants to make a serious effort to learn grammatically correct Spanish. There are minor mistakes throughout, and the explanations of preterite vs. imperfect and the uses of the subjunctive contain significant inaccuracies.

If you want to learn about Spanish culture, this book will be somewhat useful in learning some statistics. Unfortunately, it is also loaded with chauvanistic comments about how superior the Latino culture is and how friendly, polite, helpful they invariable are despite the fact that there are cities decimated by killing gnags in Mexico, some of the countries are ruled by dictators, and poverty abounds. Books on Spanish should be about the language, not attempts at brainwashing.
If you can get past the propaganda, there are some useful analyses of the readings in this book. If you hope to come away from reading this book having the knowledge to move on to the advanced level of Spanish, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.