Customer Reviews

Puntos de partida: An Invitation to Spanish (Student Edition)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I am a Spanish professor and my department requires us to teach from this text. I find the text's content to be quite grammar heavy and not engaging. The presentation of vocabulary appears random at times and the exercises are dull and not related to the chapter's content. Have you noticed that days of the week and months of the year are introduced in Chapters 4 and 5? Even in the 8th edition! Why aren't they introduced with classes?

It requires a tremendous amount of effort to actually engage students in the content. The text is not very communicative nor does it include much detail about cultural difference. I have found that this book promotes less fluency than others (namely Dos mundos or Vistas). I have taught from several Spanish texts and this one is one of the lowest on my list. McGraw-Hill hasn't done such a great job keeping up with technology or freshness of content. The way I see it, this text was useful and perhaps even cutting-edge when its first edition came around. Unfortunately the text hasn't evolved since. In all, the book is dated and needs some serious revising or needs to be phased out completely.

This is a horrible textbook to use for teaching an online course. My school uses it, and even after 2 years of Spanish in high school, the material is just way to far out there for most students to grasp easily. It starts out assuming a proficiency with Spanish words and sentence structure. The online portion is done at a normal conversation pace for native Spanish speakers, which is far too fast for this level of textbook. There is no way to slow down, or show textually what is being said on most of these online exercises.

The book is the equivalent of dropping you in the middle of Spain and saying "Figure it out".


I've self taught myself far more difficult languages with less trouble than this book is giving me.

I was excited about seeing the new edition but there is nothing new and it still is tremendously dull and tired.

I bought the Kindle edition of this textbook for my introductory Spanish class - worst choice ever. There are some serious typos (it says that téo/téa mean uncle/aunt! That's not correct and could seriously mess a student up. It's supposed to be tío/tía). I alerted Amazon to this mistake and they assured me that they were fixing it, but I just don't trust this edition any more than I can throw it, now. Amazon has excellent customer service (as usual), and they refunded my e-book. I deleted it and ordered a hard copy (which doesn't have these typos) with the refund.

I ordered this book on December 19, 2010. The last estimated date of arrival was January 11, 2011. It's now January 23 and I still haven't received my book.
I sent the seller a letter via Amazon on the 11th and never got a response back. In fact, I don't think they've even read it!
I need my book for school, but I'm so angry with this seller that now I just want my money back and will struggle through the class without the book.

DO NOT BUY BOOKS FROM THIS SELLER!

I am currently using this book for my Spanish 1 and 2 class and it is a help especially the dictionary in the back! I would def recommend getting the lab manual and the workbook with it though because if you are new to the spanish language it can be very difficult to keep up and practice makes all the difference. The book alone is great however the price is a little ridiculous! Especially since spanish varies in every country so some parts of the book are inconsistant with what we are taught and also their are words spelt incorrectly throughout the book. My professor is constantly correcting it.

It is not bad book, but the truth is that it has to be apdated, for this money it should be something new, not like this guys do - change some dialogs, but the book is the same from one year to another. There are so many new ways to study languages!

This book gives a nice grammatical background. It proposes a lot of exercises. And it gradually increases the level.

Buy your books here. I placed an order for my textbook yesterday and received great service, my book arrived the next day, and is in excellent condition. I am fully satisfied and wish I had ordered my other books here as well.

I never got the book and I am not sure why. I sent an email to the sender and have not heard a response yet. I've checked the Amazon status and it says it is order. Please if there is anyway to get the book this week that would be helpful. Thank you.