Communicating in Spanish: A First Course

by Enrique Lamadrid

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395327075
• ISBN13: 9780395327074
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 796 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Best Ever Basic College Spanish Text

This book is the 2nd edition of a first year college Spanish textbook. I taught from the 1st edition in the late '70s and was thrilled with the book and the teacher aids. It came with lesson plans, audio tapes for practice, a workbook, and visual grammar posters. Everything was excellent. The authors based their book on innovative studies on Spanish grammar by Dr. William Bull. Unfortunately, most Spanish teachers had not--and still have not--studied his approach and did not use the book because it was different from what they had learned. It is different--far superior to other ways of teaching. My last class challenged and passed the test for 2nd year Spanish after just one year of study. I am now using the second edition in adult conversational classes and would love to find the accompanying teacher aids. The grammar posters are incredibly good for illustrating many concepts in Spanish that differ from English. The textbook uses prints of some of the posters in the daily study assignments to good effect, but I use many others, as well. An example of how better language analysis aids learning is the book's looking at finite or conjugated verbs as having a stem and two suffixes. The first suffix generally indicates the tense of the verb, and the second, which shows person and number, is the same (almost) in every tense. Students easily recognize whether the subject is yo, ella, nosotros, or ellos, for example. An example of forethought given to order of presentation would be that the imperfect tense, which is very easy, is presented before the preterite, which is quite difficult. Both are simple past tenses with different uses, and the very regular forms of the imperfect are much more easily learned by students whose minds are still boggled by the whole idea of verbs having different forms for different subjects and different times. (Most are not aware that English also has different forms for different subjects and times.) I'd love to teach Spanish another 20 years from this text and accompanying materials.

Great for Beginners or for Reference

This text is undoubtedly the best beginner Spanish book on the market. It's not pretty, and there are no snazzy pictures or colors, but it explains everything clearly and gives lots of opportunity for practice, and review in later chapters. I did a Spanish summer school program last year, and my grammar was much better than my classmates', thanks to this book. If you go through this book cover to cover, you will have an excellent basis for learning to read, write and speak Spanish.