Customer Reviews

Latin American Spanish in Three Months Book and CD (Hugo)

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This book can serve as a useful review for those who have studied Spanish previously, but it is definitely not designed for beginners. Right in the first lessons some of the more difficult and less useful grammar items are introduced such as complex relative pronouns and demonstrative pronouns which are not usually presented until advanced courses.

Also the presentation of "tener" as the first verb to be studied in Lesson 1 - along with its idiomatic uses followed by "estar" and "ser" in Lesson 2 is a bit mind boggling, but with advanced students who need just a review, it would be worthwhile trying.
Although this is labeled Latin American Spanish some of the peninsular Spanish is slipped in, i.e vosotros and its forms and some vocabulary items. For a student who just needs a review and has a tutor or group to practice conversation based on the material in the text this could possibly be a worthwhile text.

Although this is supposed to be for Latin America it does not serve its purpose for two reasons. First it treats Latin America as a whole and ignores differences between the Mexican language, the Argentinian language and so on. Secondly it uses Castilian second person forms of address and this is for Spain not Latin America. Not good enough!

I wore out my cassette version by Isabel Cisneros, which I love (five stars). I hoped this version on CD would have the same voices. But the voices on this CD are poor in comparison, the people do not sound enthusiastic, so listening is not fun. If only they took the old analog tapes and simply made a CD from the old stuff, that would be great. Still, CDs are easier to use to learn, because it is easy to skip the lessons you already know well.

The book is the same, only slightly different formatting. The book is very clear, includes grammar lessons, not just "conversational" spanish.