Colloquial Spanish of Latin America: The Complete Course for Beginners

by Roberto Rodriguez-Saona

Book Overview

Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, this course offers you a practical, step-by-step approach to the spoken and written Spanish of Latin America. No prior knowledge... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415089522
• ISBN13: 9780415089524
• Release Date: July 1994
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.2" x 6.8" x 9.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

a nice course but probably better for review than for a first time learner

This is an interesting and quite contemporary treatment of Spanish. I bought it because my high school Spanish was a long time ago and I wanted to bring it up to date. Certainly this book is good for that. There are a few weak points that take it down from the five-star rating I would probably have given it- not only are quite a few words in the text unglossed, but some idioms as well, and these are harder to find in a dictionary. Also, the book takes an inordinately long time before it finally moves out of the present tense so that other tenses (and moods) don't get as much coverage as they probably should. Also, I would have liked to have had more mention of the differences in the language as it is spoken from country to country. But for all of that, there is a lot of interesting and useful material in here. And I definitely plan to get Book 2.

Excellent grounding in Spanish for beginners

I've used this book twice now for trips to Mexico, going through most of the written exercises from Chapters 1-13 a few times, and I highly recommend it. I also purchased the CDs, but never really used them much as I didn't find them too practical for actually learning to speak/understand Spanish. What this book will do: give you a good basic grounding in all the key grammar and structures of Latin American Spanish, help you in learning to read and write colloquial Latin American Spanish and have basic conversations, give you a good grounding in key vocabulary (traveling, writing emails, using the computer, shopping, renting hotel rooms, etc). It's well structured and well organized, but it's paced so quickly that I found it hard to retain some of what I learned--I ended up creating flash cards and doing some of the exercises repeatedly to make them sink in better. It's also a great reference and supplement to other language-learning programs (the one I have used with the most success is the excellent Fluenz Spanish 1+2 Learning Suite Mac, Including DVDs, Audio CDs, Podcasts, and Fluenz Navigator. Next-Generation Spanish Language Learning Software.) As the title suggests, the book takes a conversational approach--the kind of real-life language you need in actual situations. What this book won't do: give you much practice in spoken Spanish (understanding, pronouncing and speaking it yourself). Still, I found it very useful!

Beginners Spanish

This is a great book as you start basic sentences from Chapter 1. Finishing the book will make you fluent enough to get by in Spanish.

Colloquial Spanish of Latin America

I find this book great as I am learning South American Spanish, not Spanish from Spain. My teacher, who is from Argentina, also has purchased this book and is using it with other students who are learning Spanish to be used in Latin America.

A must for those of us int the 21st century

This book get 5 star for a number of reasons, but the main reason its near and dear to my heart is because it actually address things like email addresses and other technology and how they translate in spanish, None of my other book on learing spanish devote any time to things like e-mail. Being that I work in I.T. in a city that is around 75% hispanic I find this to be a nice touch.The Tapes are nice, and the book is well laid out. I recomend it to fill in all the gaps that spanish 'textbooks' have.