78 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great book, with one suggestion, May 21, 2010
This review is from: Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses, Second Edition (Practice Makes Perfect Series) (Paperback)
This book is great, I started learning Spanish two months ago as a complete beginner, I purchased this book along with Basic Spanish and Pronouns and Prepositions.
I went through Basic Spanish in 2 weeks and then delved into verb tenses. I have to say I love these exercises, it is really interesting and encourage you to continue without making you feel bored. I finished this book today with 1.5 month of daily effort.
English is not my first Language so I know how boring learning grammar could have been. I wasted so many times before trying to understand these English verb tenses. But when using this book, everything is just naturally falling into its category with the great explanation and exercise provided by the author(of course, some of them is quite similar to english, so it saved my time)
I'm not go for a grammar expert in spanish, so a clear explanation of the commonly seen verb structures like "se puede" is my expectation. Right now, I think Spanish Verb Tenses did a fantastic job
Only suggestion for this book, I wish there's review sections and exercises in the book covering different chapters, because the exercise under its own chapter title makes me little bit lazy to think about the tense deeper, I just have to use the one indicated by the chapter title.
(Another thing I'd like to mention is that the conjugation of Spanish verb is much more complex than English since it's directly from Latin, while English is not. So at first you might be little bit scared, but believe me, it is really nothing. People are not very interested in memorization these days, but if you've made up your mind to get started with these verb tenses, you can memorize of all them in a few days, firmly, and refresh it again and again in the coming days with the exercises in the book, after that, your memorization understanding will become real understanding)
Update: another suggestion for this book is about imperative. In this book, imperative is introduced before the the subjunctive, so when I used this book for imperative, I just felt that all these formation rules of imperative are just so random that I totally can not categorize them. Later someone tell me that all imperatives are just the corresponding present subjunctive except for the affirmative of tú and vosotros, So I think it might be a good thing to introduce present subjunctive before introducing imperative
Update Sept 30
It has been 6 months since I started learning Spanish, and right now I can say this book is enough for you to get a good sense of this language, to be honest, you don't need to buy any other books(maybe the pronouns and prepositions, but I found the only thing that is critically important is the RID pronouns). But you have to learn some real Spanish, the Spanish which you can not learn from any text book or work book, as for the grammar, you're already prepared after you finished this one. Practise your knowledge learnt from this book in real Spanish conversations, until turning them into your second nature
4.5/5 Highly recommended
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42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why didn't I get this when I first started learning Spanish?, May 10, 2010
This review is from: Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses, Second Edition (Practice Makes Perfect Series) (Paperback)
This is by far the best investment I've made in my Spanish learning career. This book has helped me understand so much more than anything I've ever had. Visual learning is a good start, but when you get down to the knitty gritty of things, you realize that you are going to have to know how to form sentences on your own if you ever plan on getting anywhere. This book is marked for beginner to intermediate and that seems about right.
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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best practice book EVER, May 19, 2010
This review is from: Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses, Second Edition (Practice Makes Perfect Series) (Paperback)
This is by far the best spanish workbook I have ever used. It gradually exposes the reader to vocabulary while keeping it's focus on grammar. I love the way it describes "rules" that I never could get before. I have studied Spanish for a long time, and this book helped clarify somethings to me that I didn't learn in the classroom. To anyone who has self-motivation, I would highly recommend this book.
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