No Hablo Español

August 4, 2006 5:00 AM

Can anyone recommend a book that fits the following description for an English-speaker starting to learn Spanish?

Currently I’m trying to learn from third generation photocopies entirely in Spanish, bits and bobs from various websites here and there and so on – and while the information is probably all there, the frustrating part is that there is no real flow to my learning so I frequently seem to find myself in chicken-and-egg situations. I need some first principles here.

What I think I need is a resource that will help me to learn the rules of the language in the appropriate order, which would seem to me to go something like this:

- Pronunciation
- Sentence structure
- How to conjugate the regular verbs and when to use their various cases
- How tenses work
- How possessives work
- A reasonably sizable list of the most important irregular verbs
- Etcetera

Basically, I want to be comfortable with all the above so I can be in a position to mass learn words and know which rules to employ to manipulate them correctly. I’ve not had a lot of luck searching Amazon et al, so – can anyone recommend a clear, definitive yet accessible book* that fits the bill? I don’t need cartoon pictures wasting space, although some clear examples and a little hand-holding would be nice; audio CDs (but not tapes) a bonus but not essential.

* = It doesn’t absolutely have to be a book, digital media/online resources could potentially be suitable but I think I would be more comfortable with a palpable tome.

NB: I’ve had a look at the posts tagged with "Spanish" and none of the other questions seem to specifically cover this.

posted by ed\26h to education (9 comments total)

One of my college Spanish texts, the Manual de gramática: Grammar reference for students of Spanish fits this almost exactly. It was a great book in class and I stil use it as a reference when I need to work with ill-remembered irregular grammar bits. The table of contents goes:

Overview (includes basic verb and sentence structure)

Nouns and noun determiners

Pronouns

Prepositions and conjunctions

Verbs I (Indicative, Conditional, Subjunctive, Imperative, Irregulars) - Most of your "how to conjugate and when to use"

Verbs II (Preterite vs. Imperfect, Compound tenses)

Ser, Estar, Haber, Hacer, and Tener

Appendices of irregular verb uses (things like which verbs have entirely different meanings in imperfecto and pretérito), et cetera

If this is the way you think you will be able to effectively learn Spanish, I'd get this book

The one thing it doesn't have much on is pronunciation, but it's hard to put too much detail into that in a catch-all book.

posted by whatzit at 5:38 AM on August 4, 2006

I've been looking through lots of Spanish books and CDs so that my Fiance can learn Spanish from scratch and I can get a badly needed grammar review.

Barron's Mastering Spanish would be a good start for learning pronunciation. You will have a hard time learning from a book, so it would be a great idea to start with a CD. I believe there are six CDs in the level 1 set. The first 1.5 CDs are nothing but pronunciation lessons and very detailed ones at that. The course was originally designed for diplomats and US Government workers abroad and it comes with a thick, detailed workbook that you can use if you get bored with the audio. However, this course is useless without the workbook and the learning curve is a bit steep after the pronunciation lessons are over.

Therefore, I would recommend picking up a second, less dialogue focused course called Learn Spanish in your Car. It will cover almost all of your above bullet points on the first two lessons. This series will teach you basic grammar and vocabulary very quickly, but is lacking in dialogue coverage and is impractical if you need to learn how to hold a conversation. It comes with separate, pocket-sized lesson books that make handy references. This series is great for someone starting from scratch and is especially powerful if used in conjunction with Mastering Spanish.
posted by Alison at 6:12 AM on August 4, 2006

Sorry, I meant first two levels, not first two lessons.
posted by Alison at 6:15 AM on August 4, 2006

I recommend Using Spanish: a guide to contemporary usage by R. E. Batchelor; it's got all sorts of useful charts and explanations. But really, the grammar book you use is not nearly as important as practice. You need to use the language as much as you can; you'll pick up the grammar as you go.
posted by languagehat at 6:27 AM on August 4, 2006

Let me second languagehat's suggestion; I know it's not your question, but a book will only get you so far. See if you can find a native Spanish speaker looking to learn English, and offer to meet them a few times a week to spend an hour conversing in English and an hour conversing in Spanish.
posted by maxreax at 9:42 AM on August 4, 2006

I absolutely second whatzit´s suggesiton of "Manual de gramática: Grammar reference for students of Spanish". Ive used many different books, and this is the one that has been by far the most comprehensive and useful, as well as detailing lots of other things like expressions, common usage, etcetera.

We used this in my college Spanish classes, in the intermediate level. It was written by a prof. at my university (Cornell), but I have to say this is one of the first times a professer-written text was actually worth using. WELL worth the price (it´s about 40-50 bucks used). It also has a lot of great exercises, several for every topic in the book.

For pronounciation---i definetly recommend that you try to find a copy (at your library) of spoken Spanish....Pimseleur or Michel Thomas are both good.

Or even better, find a native speaker to talk with. Note that accents can vary pretty widely, as well as usage---try to find someone that speaks "better" Spanish (more textbook-like Spanish and someone that doesnt use too much Spanglish....im not trying to pass judgement on different types of Spanish, but its definetly better if you go with something cloesr to what you´ll read in your Spanish textbooks)

I dated a PR/DR girl for a long while, and her Caribbean Spanish really messed me up when I went elsewhere...their Spanish is generally thought to be the sloppiest, with slang that is only local to the Caribbean. Even now, I use words that arent words in S. and Central America.
posted by jare2003 at 9:51 AM on August 4, 2006

and obviously, like languagehat and maxreax said, the practice is really the important part.

People will forgive your grammatical errors and the fact that you have to describe an item using basic words because you don't know its technical name, but even knowing all your grammar rules and mass-learned nouns, you can't think that fast when you're speaking unless you've spoken a lot.
posted by whatzit at 10:31 AM on August 4, 2006

Muchos gracias. So you're talkin' about a thermonuclear explosion and... "adiós, muchachos".
posted by ed\26h at 8:55 PM on August 4, 2006

I am utterly baffled as to why I wrote that.
posted by ed\26h at 10:21 AM on August 5, 2006