Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced Spanish Grammar

This diminutive book by Rogelio Alonso Vallecillos offers instruction in “topics that often cause trouble to foreign students, especially to English-speaking ones: topics like the correct use of object pronouns, when to leave out subject pronouns, how to generate sentences that indicate proposal, suggestion, reproach, and so on.”

I like the idea, but the reality of Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced Spanish Grammar just wasn’t all that much fun.

A general observation: I have worked my way through many books across multiple languages in the extensive McGraw-Hill Practice Makes Perfect series. There are two sizes: bigger and smaller. This is a member of the smaller tribe of books, and in general, I just haven’t liked the smaller ones as much as the bigger ones. There is often too much explanation relative to exercises, and the exercise design can at times be tedious or ineffective. This slim little volume did in fact suffer from those problems.

I do not mean to say that all the large-format Practice Makes Perfect books are great, or that all the small ones are disappointments, but the interior of the cute little focused books does not always live up to the promise of their initial curbside appeal.

In the end, despite some useful content and exercises, my interest fizzled, and I stopped using this book for my Spanish review. 

A note: Advanced Spanish Grammar includes some content on vosotros, the plural informal second-person form used in Spain, but not in other Spanish-speaking countries. However, its appearances are minimal.