Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced Spanish Grammar,   ISBN:9780071472685

Customer Rating: 

Advanced Spanish Grammar, by Rogelio Alonso Vallecillos, is a valuable book for reviewing many details about Spanish that textbooks often ignore. As with the other books in the Practice Makes Perfect series, it has a lot of exercises and the answer keys make it a good resource for independent study or as a supplement to any textbook or Spanish program.

I only have two minor reservations about it. One is that he doesn't use grammatical terminology. For some people, that is a plus. For me, it creates confusion because as a professor of Spanish, I want to know where to find additional exercises and explanations on specific areas of the language. When I don't see them labeled as such, I move on to the next book. For instance, in his table of contents, he has a chapter entitled "Reported Speech." I had to stop for a second to reclassify it as "indirect discourse." This makes the book less useful to experienced professors of Spanish who learned the proper taxomonies. At the same time, however, for many students, it won't really matter and in fact, will make the subject less threatening.

Lastly, the subjunctive is not dealt with head-on. On the other hand, as with everything he does address, he does a great job of explaining, and his examples are clear. For instance, although his treatment of sequence of tense is not dealt with by name, his examples should help any intuitive learner understand how to deal with it.

By all means, buy this book! It provides a good overview of many troublesome areas and does so in a non-threatening way -- and that is very important. Use it as a point of departure for the inevitable time when you'll need more focused practice.

Sincerely,

Eric W. Vogt, Ph.D.

Customer Rating: 

This book was a gift for a relative who is planning a vacation in Spain and wanted to brush up on her Spanish. She also teaches accents to actors and feels that phrasing is very important when English is not your first language.

She was very pleased with the book.

Customer Rating: 

It's probably making everything more difficult than it is, but maybe that is because I prefer language study to be traditional.

Customer Rating: 

This book is a broad review of Spanish grammar and I think quite thorough. There is no repetition so the book is very succinct. This is a book to be studied, but it is a book that teaches and explains. I find this and the other Practice Makes Perfect Spanish language books an excellent resource.

Customer Rating: 

~I have just finished going through the book and I have found it to be very helpful and it does indeed go over a lot of nitty gritty things as the other reviewer stated. It is assumed here that you are already fairly good with verb tenses and that you have a decent vocabulary in the language, but that's expected... Like the other Spanish Practice Makes Perfect books I've gone through, this book has clear explanations followed by examples and lots of different exercises to help you practice what you've learned.

~I found almost everything to be helpful and organized, with hardy any noticeable errors(including the section at the back that has the answers to the exercises). There is one thing though about the last chapter that I wish would be changed a bit. It is not the content, but the way it is organized. The last chapter lists idiomatic expressions and is followed by exercises. Listed are the spanish expressions in bold and the explanations in english, but it is not in alphabetical order. This probably wouldn't bother everyone who goes over this section but I did like the expressions that were given and found I wanted to search for specific ones to see the meanings in english but had to keep flipping through back and forth and just would have found it more convenient if it was organized alphabetically.

~I'll go over some of the parts I liked the most or found the most useful:
~You'll learn how to phrase things in different ways, how to use conjunctions (practicing writing and reading sentences using words like : in spite of, despite, not only.. but also, however, otherwise, since, so, still/yet, therefore, when, while, for, both... and, either...or/neither...nor, besides, although, though, and, as, etc).

~Also a section on some/any and other determiners like when using algunas vs. unas, cualquier(a), poco/poca/unas cuantas, ambos/los dos, todos los dias/cada dia, ningun/ninguna, etc.
There's a chapter on commands and requests, one on using the passive voice "Juan esta pintando las paredes" [Juan is painting the walls)becomes "Las paredes estan siendo pintadas [por Juan]" (The walls are being painted [by Juan])

~I liked the section on problematic prepositions including : to and toward (which can be "hacia" or "a" or "para" in different sentences) , into ("en", "dentro de"), onto, out of, and off, across, over, through, up and down, over, above, below, under, etc.

~And the last section on idiomatic constructions has useful expressions that if directly translated to English would not completely make sense (eg."llover sobre mojado" refers to adding one problem to another problem but literally translated would be in English like, "To rain over wet".), probably the author chose some of the most popular or most used idioms. (I asked my boyfriend to star which ones were used in Puerto Rico specifically because he's Puerto Rican and I'm mostly interested in expressions that are used there and he told me most of them were used). I'm sure they're popular in other Spanish-speaking countries as well.

Well, this is another excellent, clear, and for the most part very organzied addition to the Practice Makes Perfect series with super useful chapters and exercises that in my opinion any intermediate or advanced student of Spanish should have & go through.