Marcial Prado’s grammar guide and workbook Advanced Spanish Grammar: A Self-Teaching Guide is much like its predecessor Practical Spanish Grammar, also by Prado, in many ways in that it offers a broad overview of all the major concepts of Spanish grammar required for advanced writing and conversation without bogging you down in details. For the low price, that would be enough to justify a look but what makes this workbook really shine is the fact that it is written almost entirely in Spanish, even the grammar explanations. This really gets you in the habit of thinking in Spanish rather than just translating back and forth between Spanish and English and turns out to be a surprisingly effective learning tool.

Looking For Exhaustive Drills? Look Elsewhere

I am a big fan of drills and I must admit I’m not entirely satisfied by the quantity of material here. Sure, it covers all the important concepts but it doesn’t hit you with wave after wave of drill to really solidify the concepts in your mind like Dorothy Richmond’s two Practice Makes Perfect workbooks Spanish Verb Tenses and Spanish Pronouns And Prepositions. And a few of the drills that are there seem odd and out of place, such as the drills focusing on linguistic terminology: it’s great to know what a labial fricative is, but that won’t necessarily help me learn Spanish more quickly. That said, this book’s all-Spanish strategy really encourages you to think and operate entirely in the Spanish language in a way Richmond’s English-based workbooks just don’t.

The Not-Quite-Advanced Advanced Spanish Workbook

Despite the word “Advanced” in the title, I found the concepts and exercises in this book to be more intermediate than advanced so don’t let that scare you away. The explanations, while written entirely in Spanish, don’t go out of their way to use obscure vocabulary and most of the more difficult words are included in the vocabulary section of every chapter with English translations. I don’t think anybody with a bit more than a basic understanding of the language would find anything here unreasonably difficult, although lower-intermediate learners will probably have to spend considerably more time trying to decipher what’s going on. But hey, there’s no substitute for just sitting down and struggling through your lessons so that not necessarily a bad thing.

A Solid, But Not Perfect, Course

Ideally, I would like to see Practice Makes Perfect’s grammatical rigor and Advanced Spanish Grammar’s Spanish-based instruction combined into a single, exhaustive resource. Still, the fact that all three of these workbooks can be had for under $30 on Amazon makes this sort of complaint a bit silly. Based on the benefits of the all-Spanish instruction alone, I can highly recommend this book for anybody at an intermediate level or above. That said, I don’t think this book alone would be sufficient to really solidify some of the more advanced concepts in your brain due to the relative lack of drilling. I used this book alongside both of Richmond’s Practice Makes Perfect workbooks and saw some pretty dramatic improvements in my reading, writing, and speaking skills in just a few months. Of course, none of these books will help you with your listening, but that’s what audio programs are for (Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone, while a bit expensive, are my picks for that).

Buy Marcial Prado’s Advanced Spanish Grammar: A Self-Teaching Guide from Amazon.