Fundamental Spanish

This is not a bad book. It presents elementary spanish well enough so that the reader can understand it and teach themselves. The one qualmI have is that there is no dictionary at the end of the book, but I am glad there are answers to the problems.Some of the fill-in-the-blanks questions are really time consuming, it says something like "Choose from the list of wordsand fill in the blanks appropriately" and you have to go through each sentence to try to figure out which word is appropriate.The book is still good though, I like it and am learning adequately. I took a class at my local college where they useda terrible book that cost like twice as much as this one. This is a good book for people like myself who are more interestedin learning the grammar, vocabulary, and syntax first, and not just plunging into conversational spanish. i would suggest havinga spanish dictionary with you while you work out of this book because often times words will be presented which were not covered yet.If the author does a future edition, I would suggest giving more drill exercises and expanding the book and polishing the presentationa bit more. It looks like this book was written mostly in microsoft word.

Hoping to perhaps retire to Mexico, I am endeavoring to learn Spanish on my own after 30+ years has passed since I had to take Spanish in college. Although it certainly is not sufficient by itself (because one needs to actually hear the language being spoken), I find it is one of the best books I've purchased for learning the Spanish language. The material is very well organized, and I concur with those reviewers who rave about the book.The vocabulary lists, especially, are very helpful to me. I find that, in browsing them as I work through the chapters, I can refresh myself on what I used to know and pick up new vocabulary. It's encouraging to realize that, even with my native English vocabulary, I forget the meanings of words I don't often use and a dictionary is always at hand if I don't understand something. I feel like less of a dufus, in other words. The lists in Fundamental Spanish are plentiful, but each list is not overly long, so I can literally review a list when I'm watching TV, when a commercial comes on, and pick it back up later. Having the book in Kindle format, of course, makes it very easy and convenient to always have the book with me, so I get far more instruction and practice than I would if it were sitting on a bookshelf.Highly recommended.

I knew effectively no Spanish before arriving in Costa Rica for an intensive language program. I brought this and 2 other books (Madrigal and the Ultimate Spanish Review and Practice), and though I started with Madrigal (it said "Magic" on it), I found that this book was the best in helping me go through the fundamental aspects of grammar and verb conjugation in a systematic way. I quickly set aside the other books in favor of this one. One week of reading this book helped me get into the intermediate intensive language class at the Univ. of Costa Rica.I highly recommend this for people who like to learn in a structured grammatical manner (i.e. categorization by present tense conjugations, adjectives, adverbs), without ridiculous photos.One note though. The 1 star review might be nit-picky, but I do have to say I've caught a number of typos already, and some of the answers in the back might be in the wrong order and/or missing something. Fortunately, the mistakes seem relatively clear, so I can catch them and not be too thrown off, but they could be potentially bad if you rely too heavily on exactly what's in the book.Notwithstanding the typos, I highly recommend this book for those who are starting with nothing but want to learn fast.

I bought the kindle version a few years ago and I see it's no more. However, it's an excellent book for learning Spanish. Explanations are clear and lots of exercises to understand. As someone who's learned and spoken multiple languages in my life, this is a great way to progress through the language. The kindle version was a lot cheaper. I use it on my kindle for pc and I needed to refer to it to day for a refresher on a topic. This is for beginners as it covers basics and present, progressive, and two forms of past tenses in addition to adjectives and adverbs. It does an excellent job on the latter 2 topics. Highly recommended for a beginner. An intermediate won't need this.

I have been studying Spanish for about 6 months using other resources. I bought this Kindle edition so that I could continue learning while traveling. This book not only reinforced what I had already learned, but explained many things differently in a way I was more able to grasp. I intend to purchase it in hard copy, because the one complaint I have is that much of the text is in very small print, which my 63-year old eyes have difficulty reading. I also want to be able to do the exercises in the hard copy. All in all I highly recommend this book. I think the author should consider recording a CD to accompany the book, because understanding spoken Spanish and actually speaking Spanish are the hardest parts of the language learning process for me. But for a written text, this is excellent.

This book leans heavily towards a traditional grammar-translation method of language learning. What that means is that the grammar and examples tend to be divorced from context, and very contrived. Most of the sentences you come across in this book will never be used in real-life contexts. A prime example is the sentence, "¿Cuántos vasos hay en la mesa a las siete de la mañana en la casa de Ricardo?" meaning, "How many glasses are on the table at 7:00 a.m. in Richard's house?" When would someone ever need to say that? Surely there are more authentic sentences that could have been employed to better effect.I can't offer an alternative to this book as I haven't found one yet, but what I recommend for potential Spanish learners is a book that offers more authentic language in use, and also provides audio files.

really good book for self-learning as it provides you with simple exercises every each step and helps you absorb new words and new rules!

I use this book as reference for teaching spanish. It has everything you need to learn from beginner to advanced intermediate. The best thing is that the book has a lot of exercises and it is well explained for self-learning.

brand new condition, as advertisedas for the contents, i haven't got too far in yet but so far tend to agree with the other reviewers in terms of quality of content. no frills and no useless half page full colour pictures of stuff, just the fundamentals.