Customer Reviews

Complete Spanish Grammar Review (Barron's Foreign Language Guides)

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If you really want to learn Spanish the easy way, this book is the easiest way to do it. Although you cannot possibly avoid having to learn grammar and all its rules, the author did a wonderful job of simplifying all its complexities.


It starts by giving you a brush-up on the grammatical definitions that are the main focus of the study. There are twenty eight chapters covering all aspects of the Spanish grammar but you need not worry about boring vocabulary lists, useless dialogs, and complicated readings. The author presents each lesson in manageable proportions with the aim of accelerating your learning process one step at a time.

There are four main parts in the book and of course, the first few chapters deal with the Spanish basics such as pronunciation, spelling and sentence structure. The author tells you how you utter the words and its difference with how you say it in English.

The second part talks about the forms and uses of the Spanish verbs. Here you will learn about the tense, mood, and conjugation. The great thing about this book is that it provides plenty of practice activities and review materials which you can answer on your own and then just look at the end of the book for the answers.

The third part covers the other parts of speech, word formation, and negation. And you think, that's all to it but no. special topics such as numbers, dates, weather, time-telling, idiomatic expressions - all these and more are also discussed in the book! There's even a section that deals with the part of the Spanish grammar that is most confusing to all learners.

So if you want to sharpen your Spanish understanding in a sensible and enjoyable way, this is truly highly recommended.


For those who are as passionate as I am about learning Spanish I have listed My Top 10 Tools For Learning Spanish:

1. Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses, Second Edition (Practice Makes Perfect Series)
Best book on the topic of verb tenses.
2. Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Pronouns And Prepositions No other book covers the topic of Spanish pronouns and prepositions as thoroughly as this author.
3. Verbarrator Version 1.1 (Windows Version) Best software for learning how to conjugate over 500 Spanish verbs and also helps improve pronunciation.
4. A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish Most comprehensive and complete Spanish grammar book I have found.
5. Learn Conversational Spanish Now Great for listening to during long commutes or on your Ipod for improving your listening skills and actually understanding conversational Spanish when you hear it spoken.
6. Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish: A Creative and Proven Approach This is one of the classics for learning Spanish and increasing vocabulary by using words you already know in English.
7. Easy Spanish Phrase Book: Over 770 Basic Phrases for Everyday Use (Dover Easy Phrase) (Spanish and English Edition) Excellent phrase book at a great price. Also check out
8.Casi Casi Only for advanced students who think they are up to the challenge of watching a hilarious Puerto Rican comedy completely in Spanish
9. Fluenz Version F2: Spanish 1+2+3+4+5 with supplemental Audio CDs and Podcasts Comprehensive course with an excellent and knowledgeable instructor.
10. First Spanish Reader: A Beginner's Dual-Language Book (Beginners' Guides) (English and Spanish Edition) Best book that I have found for learning Spanish through reading.

I used to be very fluent in Spanish and have had occasion over the past years the need to return to previous fluency. I also live in a city that is very bilingual and a state in which Spanish is an official language. I have lots of exposure to the Spanish language but want to refresh for pending international travel. I am approximately 70 pages into this review guide and hate it. These earlier pages are dedicated to verb conjugation and the coverage is far too sparse (too much all at once)and exercises often seem unrelated to immediately preceding text and rely too much on unfamiliar vocabulary. I am ready to return to a workbook I used previously, Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses I found that workbook very helpful.

This product is an absolutely fabulous and very acurate resource. I repeatedly checked it out from the library for about a year off and on before I decided maybe I should just go ahead and buy a copy of my own.

My only dissatisfaction lies in Amazon's classification of "like new" meant, at least in my case, that the last few pages, i.e. the index in the back, were all spliced down the middle. Although this does not present that great of an inconvenience, I would have preferred that they state what the defect was if the "like new" category can include a defect where the book has been actually damaged and not just a bit worn around the edges.

Mr. Harvey does not know enough about Spanish and teaching to be writing textbooks. I tried to use his Spanish for Outreach and I would have to conclude that he has never been in the classroom, because he knows nothing about organizing information in an accessible way (see my review for that text).

In this book, I saw the following: Harvey writes that the Spanish e is pronounced like the English e in met. This is incorrect and incomplete. I stopped reading there.