Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Past-Tense Verbs Up Close

A slim little volume, Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Past-Tense Verbs Up Close is part of the gargantuan Practice Makes Perfect series from McGraw-Hill. Book weight matters when you are walking around a lot! This one contains content and exercises on imperfect, preterite, present perfect, pluperfect, conditional, and conditional perfect.

I have used other books by the writer, Eric Vogt, and I’m afraid that here and elsewhere his writing tends towards philosophical prolixity. Here, as an example, is his second paragraph:

Let pop psychology gurus say what they want about living in the now; in fact, we all speak in the now, in the sense that there is no other time in which we can exist. For grammatical purposes, the present is best viewed as a dot moving on a timeline—representing the moment or threshold of perception and utterance. Thus, the past is ever receding, with each moment of importance marked like so many telegraph poles on a desert highway seen from a speeding car.

If you like that, this book is for you. I am a very concrete language learner, and that is not for me.

Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Past-Tense Verbs Up Close contains many exercises, including useful English-to-Spanish translation practice. However, in some cases the exercise design could be improved to increase both the pleasure and the learning yielded by the effort.

The book includes content on the vosotros forms used in Spain.