Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For the price, this book is tough to beat as a self-study method for learning Spanish. It's not perfect. Originally published in the 1950s and never updated, some of its lessons have to do with taking dictation or sending telegraphs. Don't expect lessons on emailing or text messaging here. But the fundamentals of the Spanish language haven't changed much since the '50s, and fundamentally the book seems to me to be sound. I actually bought this book several years ago and tried a couple lessons before giving up in disgust and putting it back on the shelf. This was because the first few lessons are little more than huge, enormous, long lists of Spanish words, of the type "Look! Here are 100 Spanish words you already know because they are so similar to English", and "Look! Here are 200 more!" and so forth. It seemed at first that the book was going to be little more than long lists of vocabulary to memorize. But, recently, I gave the book a second chance and am glad I did so. Once you get past the introductory chapters, the book does become rather useful. Here are a couple things I like about the book: 1. Spanish has three ways of saying "you": "tu" (the familiar singular form, equivalent to the archaic English 'thou'), "vosotros" (the familiar plural form, American English's "y'all" or "you all" or "you guys") and "usted/ustedes" (the formal form, equivalent to French's "vous"). But in this book, the author entirely ignores "vosotros" and almost entirely ignores "tu", focusing entirely on "usted". Which, if you think about it, is totally fine, since as a foreigner visiting Latin America as a tourist, you should probably be using the formal form anyway. But by omitting "tu" and "vosotros", the book only needs to cover four forms: yo, usted, nosotros, and ustedes, rather than six, which means 1/3 less verb conjugation for you to get bogged down in. 2. The explanations of grammar in this book are so short, so succinct, so pellucid, that it's really something special. Other textbooks will spend an entire chapter twisting themselves in knots trying to explain the difference between the two verbs for "to be", ser and estar. Madrigal explains the difference in one little box. Throughout the book, the most topics typically most challenging and problematic for English speakers are reduced to extremely short, clear, easy to understand explanations unlike what I've seen in other books. 3. There are abundant (if sometimes repetitive and boring) exercises in each chapter, which gives you plenty of opportunity to conjugate verbs and practice the essentials. One thing I did *not* like about this book: It proceeds at what, for me, was an ideal pace -- until the last couple chapters, when in the span of a few pages, the conditional, imperative, subjective and past subjunctive were all tossed in at the last minute without ample exercises to reinforce the learning of those tenses. The book had done such a good job with the simple past tense, the present, and the imperfect, that it was disappointing that the other tenses were sort of an afterthought. Still, overall, for the price, and considering the many very terrible Spanish learning textbooks available in the US, this is a very good value, and there's a reason it's still in print after some 60 years or so. If you are a dedicated self-teacher of languages, this one is very hard to beat for its price.