Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Spanish Vocabulary

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4 star:		(1)
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I am learning Spanish for both business and pleasure and find this book an invaluable tool which has greatly increased my range of Spanish vocabulary. It is practical, up-to-date and well laid out. An excellent reference book which I would recommend to anyone wishing to enrich their grasp of the Spanish language.

What a great book. However, what is left out is this dialect of Spanish is called Castillian. This is spanish as spoken in Spain. While in Puerto Rico I repeated some of the words I learned from reading the book and the people I was talking with had a look of "What is he saying" on their faces. But, this is an excellent book for learning spanish. There are 4-5 different methods for learning Spansih outlined in this book and there is something here for everyone. I am fortunate to have a spanish speaking person working with me and I always ask questions. You will not be disappointed if you purchase this book.

The organization of this book puts it far ahead of typical vocabulary lists. Words are organized topically, with sections on family relations, work, things around the home, clothing, travel, and so on. The vast majority of the vocabulary consists of nouns. If you want to learn verbs (a few are included) and their conjugations (nothing here) this book is not for you. Prepositions, conjunctions, objects, and sentence structure are not covered at all. But as a learning aid for nouns the book is very good.

The only real negative for the book, assuming learning nouns is your goal, is that there are a few errors. While this might be overlooked in some books, a vocabulary book, like a dictionary, should not have errors in spelling and definition. It is easy to see how some of the mistakes occur. For example on page 176, in a list of the parts of the face, eyebrows are called parpados and eyelashes are called cejas. In fact, eyelids are parpados and eyebrows are cejas. This type of error could easily be prevented by a close proof reading by a native speaker. Thankfully these types of errors are few.