Spanish Grammar – The Text Books
Over the years I have used a number of Spanish text books. The reasons for the different text books were various, sometimes because it looked better than what I had been using. Sometimes because I hoped it would move me farther than the last.
The 4 books I still have on my shelves I have used but I do not remember why, exactly, I adopted or abandoned each of them.
The first book I believe I bought was the Foreign Service Institute Spanish Basic Course. It came with a box of cassettes that go through each lesson thoroughly. This course was first printed in 1957. The course is designed specifically to train U.S. government agency staff who are involved in foreign affairs and who need to learn to speak Spanish. Although the text and cassette tapes are not designed for individual self-study, they are sold and used this way extensively. I don’t remember how much I paid for the book and tapes, but I hope it was not anywhere near the $200 I see it advertised online.
Barron’s has published this course as Mastering Spanish, Level 1 with Audio CDs. The publisher’s blurb says the new edition “has been updated with new references, and up-to-date vocabulary and idioms.”
The second book that I have is Spanish is Fun, Book A that I purchased for a community education class. This book now appears to be out of print. From the writing in the book it looks like I only got to lesson 4. If I remember, I dropped out of the class because it was so basic and most of the people in the class whose only exposure to Spanish was at Taco Bell. I have considered taking another community ed class but am not sure my Spanish is good enough for the intermediate class, yet don’t want to start with a class at ground zero (or negative 3) again.
The next book I bought, Spanish Now!, I hoped to use to teach two of my teenagers Spanish as I learned along with them. Again, it looks like we made it to lesson 4! Neither of them had any interest and we had a hard time finding a set time we could do the lessons.
The last text book I have is Practical Spanish Grammar by Marcial Prado. So far I have made it to Chapter 7 and hope to make it to the end. Afterwards I plan on using the author’s sequel Advanced Spanish Grammar which is written entirely in Spanish and has good reviews as an intermediate Spanish grammar.
Of course you cannot learn Spanish just by reading some books but those will be the topic of another post.
Apart from books, which are perfectly fine for learning a language, I believe that talking is very necessary. There are a lot of countries with illiterates (people that talk but can’t read) but I’ve never heard of a country with people that can read but not speak the language.
This is a very popular problem and language teachers (be it Spanish, English, French, etc.) don’t do a very good job promoting conversation. A friend of mine took Mandarin Chinese for a year at her university. After she passed the class and some months went by, she only remembered some basic grammar rules and how to say “Hello”. She remembered this because her teacher repeated this to the students every class and they answered back in the same fashion.
I believe you’re on the right track, just don’t forget to PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! :)
Comment by Spanish — September 14, 2009 @ 11:49 am