Customer Reviews

Spanish for Cruisers : Boat Repairs & Maintenance Phrase Book

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I met the author of Spanish for Cruisers while I was sailing the Caribbean earlier this year and got a copy of this great book to take with me when I sail on to Venezuela, Columbia and Panama. After looking it over, I can highly recommend it.

Spanish for Cruisers provides all the essential boating, hardware and mechanical vocabulary and phrases that is impossible to find in any other single source.The book is divided into 25 sections, such as Materials, Hardware, Electrical, Talking to Mechanics, Refrigeration, Sails and Tools. There are also sections on basic conversation, pronunciation and asking for directions. The format is well laid out with many diagrams, a complete index , an extended back reference cover that can be used as a bookmark and a soft plastic spiral binding which allows the book to lay flat. Cruising is often defined as "doing boat maintenance in exotic places". If you're planning to sail to Spanish speaking countries of South America and the Caribbean, this book by Kathy Parsons will make the inevitable boat maintenance part of your cruise much less frustrating.

James Baldwin s/v Atom

My husband and I have cruised the Spanish-speaking Caribbean for years; unfortunately for us, all of those years were before Kathy wrote SPANISH FOR CRUISERS. We muddled along then, but next time we'll have this wonderful book with us. In fact, it will be our security blanket. It covers every possible boat repair; and I suspect it will turn a potential emergency into something commonplace.

There's a lot to say about this very well put-together book "Spanish for Cruisers". It's a handy pocket translator for boaters who need to make repairs in a Spanish-speaking country. Whether you are sailing Mexico, Central or South America, or Spain, the attention to regional differences in vocabulary will let the boater quickly bridge the language barrier.

Spanish for Cruisers allows students to get quick results from their efforts and I will be using it in my classes as well as recommending it to boaters who are learning Spanish on their own. Its practical techniques give the English-speaking boater the ability to arrange boating repairs, carry on conversations and communicate information needed in emergencies. Spanish for Cruisers provides boaters with the most important verbs that they will need for everyday conversation using strategies that eliminate the need to master difficult conjugations. Another asset is that phonetics (pronunciation) is provided for every word and phrase. This allows students to start communicating quickly without a teacher.

Spanish for Cruisers makes communication easy, fun and rewarding and I recommend it highly.

This Spanish For Cruisers is not as good as the French For Cruisers book. Hopefully the author will put more everyday language and words in to help out when at a restaurant, for those of us who are Spanish language impaired. It is however, an invaluable guide for boating words that would not normally be in a Spanish to English dictionary.

Visiting a country, especially by boat, without a handle on their language can cripple your experience. Learning a new language on relatively short notice, or even resurrecting one you learned in school, is not easy even in the simplest travel circumstances. Visiting a country by boat brings with it a whole host of other problems as most words that apply to a cruiser's daily existence simply don't exist in normal dictionaries, let alone language programs or lesson books!

Spanish for Cruisers, by Kathy Parsons (a cruiser herself) is a unique jump-start system for those of us arriving in a Spanish-speaking country (a good chunk of the South and Central America rims of the Caribbean, not to mention Puerto Rico and the whole Pacific Coast from California on down). Parson's system lays out strategies for communicating with everyone a cruiser is liable to meet even before they set foot ashore -- customs, immigation and other radio contacts -- as well as all the merchants and repairmen with whom cruisers NEED to interact when there is a part, small or large, needed for repair. The book is laid out in such a manner not only that it makes it easy to construct basic, everyday conversations, but to actually lay it open on at an appropriate subject area and POINT to a picture of the part required!

I've been studying with the book now about six weeks, and using Parson's strategies - based on such power verbs as "I need" and "I want" (for example) coupled with verb infinitives like "to buy", "to find", "to go", "to eat", "to drink", etc., I am already having fairly complex conversations!

We sail for Venezuela and points west in about a month. I am thrilled with what this book has given me, for visiting a country without a means to communicate with its people, to visit its markets, and to start friendships, make the whole effort of getting there rather pointless.