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Master Spanish Grammar
Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses: This, along with its companion below, is the single best Spanish grammar resource on the planet. It's over 200 pages of explanations and exercises with plenty of practical vocabulary mixed in. Each section starts with an overview of a certain verb tense, mood, use etc and then offers exercise after exercise for you to do until you get it right. The best part of this workbook is that it makes you write entire sentences and not just fill-in-the-blank like most others. After all, conjugating a verb is only half the story. You also have to be able to come up with the rest of the sentence on your own. This book covers every verb tense and mood in the language and when you're done, you'll rarely have a question about any of them. Even typically hard parts of the Spanish verb system such as preterite versus imperfect and indicative versus subjunctive seem easy after you've been through this book. A month and a half working through this book every day during your lunch break will earn you a better grasp of the Spanish verb system than most 2nd or 3rd year Spanish students. If you do nothing else, spend $9 on this book and do it now.
Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions: This is the seminal companion workbook to the seminal Verb Tenses workbook reviewed above. Pronouns and prepositions may not be as exciting as verbs but they are every bit as important. If you've ever had a question about how to use reflexive pronouns or whether they come before or after the indirect object, look no further. Don't know whether to use por or para? The chapter on it will take out all the guesswork. The structure pretty much mirrors that of the Verb Tenses book: lots of exercises and clear, concise explanations. This book is significantly shorter than the Verb Tenses book (by about 100 pages I believe) and so can be finished rather quickly. If you could only buy one, I would go with the Verb Tenses book but you really should work through both. As I said on my Intermediate Spanish page, these books are so good that if you were to do both of them thoroughly and nothing else, you would be able to hold your own in any online Spanish chat-room. Between the two you will easily accumulate 1000 new words which is just icing on the cake. In case it's not clear, I love these 2 books!
Practical Spanish Grammar: A Self-Teaching Guide: This is a pretty good beginners Spanish grammar book. Although not nearly as good as the Practice Makes Perfect series, it does cover a few points they left out. While Practice Makes Perfect is very, very in-depth, this particular book offers a general overview of the important points of the language without getting too technical. Each chapter opens with a list of 20 - 30 vocabulary words that you should learn completely before continuing to the grammar section and then the exercises. Don't expect everything to magically become clear from this book but you will learn a good deal of vocabulary and have a good basic overview of the various areas of Spanish grammar. The real doozies such as the subjunctive, por and para, etc will still be completely foreign to you, though. This would be best used while you're still a beginner or not at all as it will probably be too basic for you once you reach the intermediate stage and start on the Practice Makes Perfect books.
Advanced Spanish Grammar: A Self-Teaching Guide: This sequel to Practical Spanish Grammar carries most of the same advantages and disadvantages as its predecessor. One huge advantage, though, is that it is written almost entirely in Spanish, even the explanations. This really gets you into the habit of thinking in the language and will rapidly move you ahead. Don't worry too much about the title, though, because it's much more intermediate than advanced and the Spanish explanations are quite easy to understand. It is worth noting that this series has a bizarre obsession with linguistics terms and actually includes them in several of the exercises. How knowing what a fricative is will help you with your Spanish is beyond me, but their intrusion is minor and doesn't get in the way. Again, this is a very broad overview and won't dig too deeply into any one topic. However, you should come out of it with a functional understanding of all but the most advanced topics of Spanish grammar. Definitely recommended if only for the Spanish explanations but definitely not on par with Practice Makes Perfect.
Essential Spanish Grammar: I own both the Spanish and German version of this little gem and both are excellent. It is short at just over 115 pages and offers only the Spanish needed to learn to Speak immediately. It won't bog you down with more elegant constructions or complicated grammar rules but gets right down to the nitty gritty or everyday Spanish. He goes through all the most important structures and verb tenses and offers several examples for each. This one is suitable for the beginner-intermediate student or anyone looking to brush up after a few years away from the language. I can whole-heartedly recommend this book based on its high quality and low cost.
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