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From Dover Publications: 2,001 Useful Spanish Words!

4 Spanish, Books, Vocabulary

This is a great book to keep with that pile of magazines in your bathroom—and I mean that as a compliment!  2,001 Most Useful Spanish Words is not exactly the kind of book the average person would…

Seymour Resnick's Essential Spanish Grammar, from 1959!

3 Spanish, Books

I really liked Seymour Resnick’s Essential French Grammar, so I was disappointed not to be able to give his Essential Spanish Grammar a similarly glowing review. There is a special place in my heart for…

Advance Your Spanish Skills

3-5 Spanish, Books

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…

This Book Is Pretty Heavy

5 Spanish, Books

This book, by John Butt and Carmen Benjamin, is for people who take their Spanish grammar very seriously. It is a comprehensive reference guide that goes into gory detail on all things grammatical in Spanish.  To give…

Perfect Your Spanish Verb Tenses

4 Spanish, Books

This book can be your companion for a review of the present tense, reflexive verbs, irregular verbs, present progressive, preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, present perfect, past perfect, imperative, subjunctive, and more. You can be a beginner and use it, but…

Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish Grammar

3-5 Spanish, Books

Like other books in the sprawling Practice Makes Perfect series from McGraw-Hill, this one, written by Gilda Nissenberg, is packed with exercises. Some are good, but some could be better. I ended up skipping many of them. …

For a Verb Workout

3-5 Spanish, Books

“If you are a true beginner,” writes author Frank H. Nuessel in the introduction to Barron’s Spanish Verb Workbook, “you will find that this book makes no assumptions. You will learn about the other [i.e., non-verb]…

Oxford Learner’s Spanish Dictionary: I Like the Heft of This

3 Spanish, Books, Dictionaries, Kids

What makes this a learner’s dictionary as opposed to a regular dictionary is that this one has word tips and examples for the language newcomer. I am sort of a hard-core traditionalist about dictionaries, so I didn’t take…

Spanish Grammar Drills: Lots of Good Translation Exercises

4 Spanish, Books

“If you’ve picked up this book,” writes Rogelio Alonso Vallecillos (fabulous name!) in Spanish Verb Drills, “you know that to learn a language well—to read and write and to understand others and be understood yourself—at…

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