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The Complete Idiot's Guide to Spanish Verbs (The Complete Idiot's Guide)
by Gail Stein
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Alpha (2003-07-01)
ISBN: 1592570003
EAN: 9781592570003
Dewy Decimal #: 428.2421
Paperback: 400 pages
Release Date: 2003-07-01
SKU: N3012
Condition: Good
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
With a unique blend of reference and tutorial chapters that makes the challenge of Spanish verbs far less daunting, this book offers simple explanations and examples for regular verbs, extended listings for irregular verbs, separate exercises for each tense, and an extended tense reference in the appendixes.
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Customer Reviews
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Not for idiots.
Rating  (2)
Date: 2007-04-08
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I have to agree with Deborah W. The book is badly structured, and is definitely not for idiots.
Here's clarification:
I feel lost on page 6. The author throws a WHOLE lot of information at you in rapid-fire succession. Information that has no examples, and almost no context. It's like being told a stream of unintelligible trivia with no context.
Flipping through the book, I see the author takes each piece of "trivia" and then clarifies it. For example, she throws words like "preterit" and "pluperfect" at you but doesn't really explain it until much later when they have their own section.
What the reader has to do is say "OK. I will familiarize myself with these strange terms even though I don't know what they mean and won't worry about understanding until I reach the relevant chapter".
That's not how an idiot learns. Nor is it how a linear mind learns. Maybe I'm too used to reading math and science books where you don't move on until you understand the subject matter at hand.
Perhaps the book gets better later on. But the first chapter, at least, is very difficult to assimilate. I wouldn't call the book "user friendly" and certainly wouldn't call it "for idiots".
For what it's worth, my main issue is with HOW the information is presented in logical structure. The writing style is actually quite nice, and is perhaps why the author claims the book is user friendly.
But when all is said and done, this is not an easy book to learn from for me.
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One of the Best Books in Spanish Verbs
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-03-09
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
In the first and the second chapters, the author has done a wonderful job in providing readers a whole picture of the Spanish verbs, including how all the tenses are formed and how the verbs are to be systematically and properly conjugated. The sketch for spelling-changing verbs on page 21 and the sketch for stem-changing verbs on page 25 are unique and I have never seen the better presentation in other books. Appendixes D, E, and F also provide a more extensive list of spelling and stem changing verbs than most of other books. I have many Spanish grammar books about the Spanish verbs, but I found this is the most useful for me. However, the book needs to provide more examples, and to use more examples in a form of a complete sentence instead of a simple phrase.
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Badly structured
Rating (2)
Date: 2006-02-26
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
Very frustrating organization. It is supposed to be a workbook format but does not stucture lessons for easy learning. Has too much coming at you too quickly....you have to jump back and forth through sections to piece together the information you need to successfully complete the exercises.
Generating frustration (rather than starting small and buidling on early successes) is not a good way to go....especially for a book that is trying to appeal to those "idiots" amoung us that expect a simplified format. Not happy with this book at all.
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