67 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
FUN, easy to use and it DOES expand your vocabulary!, July 26, 2007
This review is from: Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Vocabulary (Practice Makes Perfect Series) (Paperback)
Speaking as somebody who is teaching themselves Spanish, I'd have to say that this book does what it claims and DOES IT WELL! USEFUL, ENTERTAINING, EASY TO USE and YOU LEARN VOCABULARY. Better than a dictionary and a whole LOT MORE FUN!
I also own the PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT VERBS, the PRONOUNS & PREPOSITIONS volume AND the COMPLETE SPANISH GRAMMER books in the series. Personally, I think this book is an excellant companion book and fits in well with the series. True, it doesn't have the LONG translation excercises, but it does contain LONG reading segments in Spanish which is, in my opinion, the best way to learn VOCABULARY! Believe me, YOU LEARN VOCABULARY when you read this book. I know today's "educators" frown upon rote learning and "memorizing", but, quite frankly, if you don't memorize anything, how much can you really know??? The reading excercises make your brain work on recalling the words from MEMORY. Sure, there's not a lot of long excercises which require you to write, but there ARE LOTS OF PRACTICE EXCERCISES.
I found the book to be FUN and ENJOYABLE. I'm learning a LOT and it's FUN, too! Unlike the Verb book, you can skip around from unit to unit. Read a unit while you're eating lunch or riding on the bus. Short sentence and phrase translations, fill-in-the-word, and true and false excercises mean you can do many of the exercises IN YOUR HEAD without the need for pencil and paper. Subject grouped word lists followed by reading excercises, short translations and T/F quizes makes your brain retain the words. And to achieve even a conversational level in any language, who would disagree that one must fill their memory with words??? You can read, study and use this book anywhere and anytime you have five free minutes. It WORKS, so I'm not sure I understand why it's not receiving better reviews.
It shouldn't be the FIRST book you buy in this series, though. I'd recommend getting VERBS first, PREPS & PRONOUNS second, GRAMMER third and this book AFTER you've used the others, as this book presupposes that you already have a basic grasp of how to conjugate verbs and construct a sentence. It DOES REVIEW verbs in general, ser/estar, reflexive verbs, por/para, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, and grammer--all the while introducting new words and how different, but related, words are formed through the use of suffixes and prefixes.
Not only will you learn vocabulary, but you might just find a few surprising tid-bits of knowledge about history, historic and contempory people, current events, religion, science and more!!!!
All in all, I'm VERY PLEASED with this book, and I give it FIVE STARS. It's USEFUL, FUN, and EXPANDS YOUR VOCABULARY--exactly what the publisher claims. It's also INEXPENSIVE and actually has 388 PAGES of text and exercises, 436 pages total (including the answer keys). For the price, you can't go wrong!
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Muchas palabras y muchas historias, September 11, 2008
This review is from: Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Vocabulary (Practice Makes Perfect Series) (Paperback)
This book is excellent. I have gone thru it from A to Z and find virtually no faults with it. There are well over 10,000 words presented, and they are words that are commonly used in every day language. There are plenty of exercises to test your learning abilities. Also there are short stories using the words you have just learned and some you have learned in previous sections. For example, after presenting some legal terms, the author presents a discussion of the "Trial of the Century" - a discussion of the O.J. Simpson trial using some of the legal words you just learned. She discusses weights and measures, then gets into a discussion (in spanish of course) on the history and how make a Harvey Wallbanger. The book is full of many catagories of words and followed up with exercises and stories. She does not try to overwhelm you with spanish grammer, as the entire book concentrates on vocabulary and not verb tenses/grammer, and she does this by keeping the whole book in the Present Tense. Even though many of the stories happened in the past, she keeps them simple by writing them in the present, but concentrating on the words just covered. This way you concentrate on vocabluary and not so much on grammer. Over 10,000 words is a lot to learn, but she presents them is such a way that retention is enhanced. Give it a try, its a great book!!
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37 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not enough practice, June 13, 2007
This review is from: Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Vocabulary (Practice Makes Perfect Series) (Paperback)
I've just got this book and it is a good compilation of wordlists and some grammar rules but the main reason why I bought it is "Practice Makes Perfect" and this book doesn't belong to this series. I have "Verbs" and "Pronouns and prepositions" from this series and both of them have a lot of exercises and this one doesn't - just a few simple ones per each chapter. Like a regular grammar book and I have quite a few already.
This book has a lot of very useful material and if you are not looking for extensive language building exercises you will find this book useful, otherwise - look elsewhere.
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