Customer Reviews

Ingles Para Dummies

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I found this book to be quite useful for me, as I am a teacher of beginning English in classes comprised mostly of latinos. I speak and read Spanish at least half as well as English. Ingles para Dummies has a lot of lists of vocabulary and of expressions, and pages of examples I can incorporate into my lessons. But it is not likely to be useful for its avowed purpose, that is, for a student trying to learn English by him/herself.

It begins with two chapters, the first being all about pronunciation, and the second being an introduction to English grammatical structure. Only in the third chapter does it begin to give the student things to say. Of course, a student will have no idea what the rules of pronunciation and grammar are all about before he gets things to say in the language. Rules are inferred from usage, not the other way around. The first priority of anyone learning a language is communication.

When I teach, I start off with "I am Ned," "you are Alfonso", "she is Maria", etc. My students first learn to talk to one another, and in the process pick up pronouns and verb conjugation implicitly. This book wants the reader to learn a list of words first, and only later discover the utterances that the words fit into.

As to the very difficult pronunciation in English compared to Spanish, the book makes no attempt to teach its readers the correct pronunciation of English short vowels or "th" or "sh." It orthographizes "This is Kevin" as "Dis is Kevin" which would be pronounced by the Spanish-speaker as "Dees ees Kayveen". Not good.

Of course, it goes without saying that one can't learn any language from just a book. One has to have a human, a teacher or friend, to provide the sounds, intonation and rhythm. Bottom line: Ingles para Dummies is a decent reference, but a poor maestro.

I use this book to help my Mexican boyfriend learn more English for his job. This is the second book we have purchased, and while it is VERY in-depth for a beginner book, it is somewhat overwhelming and off-putting. Since I am a native English speaker, I am able to unravel some confusion for him that might otherwise have remained unclear. The material is good, but a little bit too grammar-oriented for the novice English student.

Realmente util, son capitulos que van paso a paso descubriendo los tips del idioma ingles, puedes empezarlo del capitulo que te sea comodo, de acuerdo a tu conocimiento, te aconsejo revisarlo todo.
Esta acompañado de un CD, para afianzar el oido, quiza, le falte practica de escrituta.
Una buena inversion!!

Si no sabe nada de Ingles es un buen libro porque explica a groso modo las reglas basicas, pero si solo quiere conocer modismos del idioma o mejorar sus habilidades en Ingles, le recomiendo otro mas avanzado.

I love it! I bought one for myself a year ago and now I bought this one for my friend and she loves it too. It's easy and useful!!
Me encanta! compré uno para mi hace un año y ahora compré otro para mi amiga y a ella tambien le encanta. Es facil y útil.

I teach English to a group of Spanish speakers and have been looking everywhere for a book like this! Most ESL books are written for anyone learning English, so they can't be specific about the person's native language foundation as it relates to learning English. In going through parts of this book with my students, there have been many "Ah hah!" moments for them, because many concepts in English are taught through comparison to what they already know in Spanish. I don't use this book as my main resource -- I am teaching from other ESL books, but I use it as a supplemental resource and have found it to be very effective and fun for my students.

Ingles para Dummies is a pretty good resource for those learning English, but be prepared to wait a really long time to receive it. Amazon promises shipping that it never delivers, the wait on this book wasn't too bad, maybe 2 weeks, but I have had other books take over a month and then just not show up and Amazon is not too responsive about these shipping issues unfortunately.