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Practice Makes Perfect: French Verb Tenses (Practice Makes Perfect Series) 1st Edition

4.4 out of 5 stars 31 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0071478946
ISBN-10: 0071478949
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Product Details

  • Series: Practice Makes Perfect Series
  • Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (August 21, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0071478949
  • ISBN-13: 978-0071478946
  • Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.8 x 10.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,342,950 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Paperback
Thank Heaven for this little book! I met the author on my bus ride home one day earlier this year. He noticed me plodding through my huge Spanish practice book and correctly noted that I was trying to learn. I now have a copy of this book, and in the first few pages, it cleared up something that I've been trying to figure out since I started studying Spanish in the late 80s--when to use the preterite versus the imperfect! That issue has literally been driving me crazy.

The author gets right to the point and gives you simple, easy-to-remember explanations of how to use the preterite and the imperfect tenses. Within 5 minutes, I felt I had the confidence to finally figure it out. The exercises help you seal in that knowledge and practice, practice, practice!

This book is highly recommended -- get it and learn how to speak the past-tense properly. You won't regret it!
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Format: Paperback
I have read the Spanish version of this book, and this book is just as good. The explanations of the present tense, the passe compose, the imparfait, and the subjunctive are formidable. The book is divided into the following sections:

1. The Present Tense of Regular Verbs
2. The Present Tense of Irregular Verbs
3. A few impersonal verbs
4. Reflexive Verbs
5. The passe compose
6. The imperfect tense (l'imparfait)
7. The pluperfect tense (le plus-que-parfait)
8. The passe simple
9. The Future Tenses
10. The conditional
11. The subjunctive
12. The infinitive
13. The imperative
14. The present participle and the gerund
15. The Passive Voice

Although this book was great, I wish it had a better explanation of the subjunctive. It explained the present du subjonctif and the passe du subjonctif, but not the imparfait du subjonctif or the plus-que-parfait du subjonctif.

I liked the explanations of the passe compose and the imparfait, but the explanations are pretty much the same as in any other French grammar book. The same goes for the subjunctive. I don't particulary understand why the infinitive was explained at the END of the book. I think it should've been at the beginning.

Brandon Simpson
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Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
This book is full of information but it is presented in a form that has no "teaching ablility" for the average student. Yes, all the information is there, but unless you are an advance student of spanish or at the end point of your quest to learn spanish and NEED A REVIEW, seek help elsewhere. The other "Practice Makes Perfect" series books I own are extremly well done, which focus on: Verb tenses, Vocabulary, Pronouns, Complete Grammer, etc., but this one, "Spanish Past-Tense Verbs" is the absolute pits in teaching format for the average beginner/intermediate student. It has no expanded information on the lessons presented, but assumes you already know it all and need a refresher or expanded explination of the subject, definitely not for the novice or intermediate learner!

Continuing Guitar Player
H.C.
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Format: Paperback
I got this book at a very good time since I'm about to teach my Spanish class the difference between the imperfect and the preterit. I will probably use some of the exercises in this book to help my students understand the past tenses.

Table of Contents

1. The Imperfect: Description and Background
2. The Preterit: Narration, or what happened?
3. The imperfect and the preterit together: Narrating and describing the past
4. The present perfect: What have you done for me lately?
5. The pluperfect: What happened before something else
6. The conditional: What would be and the future of the past
7. The conditional perfect: What would have been
8. The sequence of tenses: Observations on the indicative and the subjunctive

The section on the present perfect is very interesting. The author has noticed that students have been using the English present perfect less and less recently. I have noticed that several of my Spanish-speaking friends use the Spanish present perfect less than I had learned.

Brandon Simpson
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Format: Paperback
What a fantastic, easy review of past tense verbs. It wasn't at all confusing this time. (I've said it before and I'll say it again, some of the Practice Makes Perfect books need to be used in high school foreign language classes.) I had a blast revewing my past tense verbs. I liked that there was Spanish-to-English translation and vice versa. Also nice were the activities where you had to explain why you used a specific tense. The last chapter reviewed tense ordered and had 50 fill-in-the-blank exercises of verb conjugation. The key for this exercise was especially helpful, b/c it told you why you had to use the specific tense.

I enjoyed this book so much that I pulled out my 501 Spanish Verbs to continue reviewing the tenses. I'm not intimidated anymore! :D

Highly recommended!
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Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
"French Verb Tenses" is a handy tool and worth the money. But there is a glaring lack in the book for those who want to become comfortable with verb usage in French (or Italian or whatever other languages for which the company produces books with this format): a surprisingly small number of examples of complex sentences and other cases where one needs two different modes of verbs. "I wish I were dead" is an example of a sentence containing the subjunctive mode. Romance languages use the subjunctive much much more often than English, and the "Practice Makes Perfect" series should pay much more attention to training the learner in the intricacies of that usage. The native English speaker can purchase books with titles like "the conjugation of 500 French [or Italian or Russian or whatever] Verbs." What the "Practice Makes Perfect" series does is give the reader practice in actually using all of those forms. The publishers of the series would do well to add 50 or more pages to each book. The subjunctive mode is a necessity, not only in literary French, but in everyday colloquial French.

Nevertheless the series is a useful tool. It's just that is incomplete.

Practice Makes Perfect : French Verb Tenses
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