Customer Reviews

1001 Most Useful Spanish Words (Dover Language Guides Spanish)

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

With only 55 pages, it packs a ton of vocabulary! It's so thin I can put it almost anywhere, even inside another book! Wonderful for building vocabulary on the go. It has the Spanish word, it's definition, then it has A SENTENCE IN SPANISH to show context, AND the English translation!!! If that wasn't enough, the last few pages it has groupings of words under various subjects. AND some vocabulary tips!!! I can't say enough about this little book. And did everybody see the price??! Unheard of!! Every new student of Spanish should own one.

P.S. I think the person who gave this book a poor rating was being extremely unkind. This book never says it's anything other than it is. A book to build vocabulary. It's not a dictionary. Dictionaries cost a lot more, and are heavy. (This book weighs 2 oz.!)

Okay, I thought that $1.95 was a misprint, and I bought it just to get a bargain. But omigod, talk about a bargain! At ten times the price, this book would be a bargain. It's not going to teach you to speak Spanish. It's not going to help you conjugate Spanish verbs. It's not going to make you fluent or able to read the newspaper in Zihuatenejo. But know what? It's going to make your next foray into a Spanish-speaking country a whole lot easier.
Overall, it's a dictionary, but there are subsections like food, colors, travel, clothing, and within those sections things are arranged alphabetically. Each word is used in a whole sentence (many of which are very handy sentences to have at your disposable) with translation, of course.
Anyway, stop reading this review and buy this book. Hell, at this price, buy 10 and give them to everyone in your family the next time you go south of the border.
Highest recommendation, and an utter steal at this price.

A light (and I really mean light - the book weighs about 2 ounces) and helpful book for anyone trying to build their Spanish vocabulary. Printed by the good people at Dover Publications, the book lacks the fancy designs, illustrations, and other graphics that books are generally well known for, however it is a very resourceful book to have around.

Author Seymour Resnick does a great job in compiling the 1,001 most used words in the Spanish language, however there is one negative thing about this book. There is not a pronunciation guide throughout the whole book. Although it's not a dictionary, it is always helpful to have this reference mentioned in a foreign-language book. Besides this fault, this book will make excellent reading material for anyone trying to brush up on their Spanish before a trip, meeting, or just to chat with a friend or relative.

This book has about 50 pages of dictionary, followed by word lists by category (such as the family, days, months, numbers, colors, foods, and animals, among others), and finally a page of "vocabulary tips," which are things like "English -ous is often Spanish -oso."

One major disadvantage of this book is that the dictionary section is Spanish-English and there is no English-Spanish section. Obviously, with only a little over a thousand words, the book is not meant to be an exhaustive dictionary, and it does not really function as one. I was surprised at how useful I found one part of the book- the list of foods (Spanish-English, like the dictionary section). There were many words on this list that I did not know but felt I should, such as "almond" and "celery."

I went through the dictionary section and found that each page (with about 22 words) had an average of 4 words I didn't know. (To give background on my Spanish knowledge, I have taken 4 years of high school Spanish, plus a lot of reading and studying in my spare time). I happily highlighted those words and began studying them, since they are, as the title claims, very useful. I think that this book might be most helpful for someone who has taken around 2 years of high school Spanish, as that person would know far fewer of the words. On the other hand, it might be an overwhelming amount to memorize, so maybe not.

Here is an example entry taken from the book (I think this falls under fair use...):
"arrojar to throw Se prohibe arrojar objetos por la ventanilla. It is forbidden to throw things out of the window." At times the entry will also specify that the word is used in a certain country or region, which is very helpful considering the variation in the language in different Spanish-speaking countries.

All in all, a useful little book, and a good resource for learning Spanish. Its scope is small, but it achieves what it aims for very well.

I am "conversational" in Spanish. I am not fluent in the language but confident that I will eventually become completely fluent in Spanish. After trying many different methods to learn Spanish with little success, I have devised my own method.

Both 1001 Most Useful Spanish Words and Easy Spanish Phrase Book have been two of the most important tools in my arsenal. My method of learning involves the following:

1.) Use both 1001 Most Useful Spanish Words and Easy Spanish Phrase Book to build you vocabulary.

2.) The two books that I mentioned above are very easy reads. It's a good idea to read them more than once. You can read them at your convenience because they are very compact and easy to carry around. That explains how I got in the habit of never leaving home without one or the other. And if I have to wait at the doctor's office, have my hair done, or wait to have my
car serviced, I always have one or the other book to read.

3.) You'll also need a comprehensive course to serve as your basis. Any of the big-league courses will do (e.g. Learning Spanish Like Crazy, FSI Spanish, Pimsleur Spanish). But I prefer Learning Spanish Like Crazy. Not only do I find its method to be a fun and easy way to learn Spanish but I don't have a lot of time on my hands so it is rare that I can actually "stop" in order to study. I like Learning Spanish Like Crazy because I can use it for 30 or 40 minutes per day while I am in my basement running on my treadmill. Let LSLC serve as your foundation. IMHO, it's the best of the big-league courses with one caveat: Make sure that you download the revised LSLC lessons as advised in the instructions that come with the LSLC CDs from Amazon. Use this course to develop a good Spanish accent and to learn how to form your own sentences in Spanish, think in Spanish, etc.

4.) The next step is a very important part of my lesson plan (only second to #6). Whenever I am in my car I'll have 2 different CDs in the CD changer from Learn in You Car Spanish and I'll also have 2 different CDs in the CD changer from Behind the Wheel Spanish. So whenever I am in my car, I'm exposed to a different teaching method and hearing different Spanish speakers.

5.) When using Learn In Your Car Spanish CDs and Behind the Wheel CDs, listen to each CD at least 4 or 5 times. And do the same with the Learning Spanish Like Crazy CDs. If you are not able to make your response before the speakers on the recordings, then you know that you have not mastered the CD and that you need to repeat the CD again before replacing it with another CD.

6.) The next step is probably the most crucial in my lesson plan. Make sure that you practice what you have learned with native Spanish speakers. Using 1001 Most Useful Spanish Words and the other resources will give you all of the fundamentals that you need, but to perfect your skills and become conversational and eventually fluent, you'll have to practice with a native.

I found this book really useful. If you already know how to put together basic sentences in Spanish (I've only taken first semester Spanish)then studying from this book gives you a really good basis for conversation. When I was travelling in Mexico last year I remember trying to look up a lot of these important words and phrases in the dictionary but being unable to find them. If you plan on trying to use your Spanish you should study from this list of essential words, many of which are often left out of beginning Spanish books for some reason. The book also gives clear examples of how the word should be used in a sentence, which is helpful.

I am in Antigua, Guatemala, 7 weeks into an immersion spanish program. I have glanced through a number of small dictionaries or books that seek to build vocabulary. The choice of words is always puzzling. For example, you might find the spanish word for "elf" but then be unable to find "fork".

This book on the other hand has a very wise choice of words. It covers most of the verbs and nouns and what not you will need for basic conversations. "to have", "to want", basic foods, basic prepositions. So far, it has the wisest choice of words I have seen. Furthermore, each word comes with a sentence, which helps with grammar and usage. ...

If you've taken more than one semester of Spanish in school, this book won't be able to help you much. For me (my wife is Mexican and I have learned a lot from her. I have also completed up through Spanish 201 in college), this book did not teach me a thing. However, for my grandma who has no experience with Spanish and wanted to learn some voculary words in order to communicate easier, this book was perfect. This book could be one of the most useful you have or one of the most useless, depending on who you are and at what level of Spanish you are at. Make sure that you need it before you buy it, but for two bucks you can't do much better if you are looking for a good vocaulary list.

It's appropriate to judge a book's success based on how well it fulfills its intended goals. If I write a book on modern popular music, for example, I would not expect it to be disparaged if it insufficiently covers medieval architecture or Roman medical advances.

This analogy comes to mind when thinking about this book. At first, I was myself tempted to dismiss the book. On the negative side, each word has only one sentence, and there's no English-to-Spanish section. What good is that?

Other reviewers have taken this tack. A book with 1000 words isn't going to be useful if you know much more than 1000 words. And a book with no pronunciation guide is not going to be very useful for beginngers.

On the other hand, the clear purpose of this book is one that I feel it does quite well: it's for the intermediate student (like me) and shows you which words to concentrate on learning. In other words, it helps me build my working useful vocabulary. I have several dictionaries: the problem for me is to know which words out of the 80,000 to concentrate on learning and which to ignore.

In some cases, you can look at the English and take a guess: the word meaning "talk" is likely to be very useful and "disambiguate" less so. Again, though, it's that middle category I want to know about: the ones that are useful even though, not having made a serious study of word usage, they don't seem so to me. And that's where the book really shines. It's a handy list of those words.

Its small size is also a plus. I carry it around with me and look at it from time to time when I have a free second.

In summary, this is a good little book that will help the intermediate student build his working vocabulary. It's not perfect, but it's a decent little book to have around.

This is a great book to increase your everyday vocubulary. As a resident of Mexico, I used this book with great success and you certainly can't beat the price! The words used really are among the most common in everday speech.