Mastering a Spanish Vocabulary: A Thematic Approach

Barron's series Mastering Vocabulary is a great tool for language learners! As another reviewer points out, this is not a book for teaching yourself grammar. It is, though, a great way to move on from knowing the basics to being competent in the language. Using a normal course, such as one in the Colloqial series, you will end up with knowing the grammar relatively well and with a vocabulary of 1500 words. That's a good start, but you need to know more words to get moving. The Mastering Vocabulary series is a great help along the way. By doing one chapter each week, you will know more than 7000 words after half a year. That is enough to live in a language where the language is spoken and use it in all everyday interactions and communication. My only real complaint with the series is that it's not available for more than four languages.

I have to admit that I've never had a Spanish lesson in my life, but I would really like to learn it, at least well enough to read Spanish books and magazines. While I've had French and have done considerable reading recently in that language, I have not had any serious exposure to Spanish vocabularly, so I purchased this volume to assist in developing a basic vocabularly. While I find it a little daunting, I'm surprised at how much I've been able to learn. The book is arranged in a manner that presents primarily nouns and adjectives in logical classes. The reader learns a word and its meaning and then sees how it is used in a sentance, thereby passively learning something of sentance structure and other word forms like verbs and adverbs. I find this method works well for me, because I really am a noun-adjective person more than a verb-adverb person. I can remember the concrete more thoroughly than I can actions and ideas, probably because I'm a visual person--not to mention a not very active one. I've purchased several children's books in Spanish: Lemony Snicket, Harry Potter, and the Spiderwich Chronicals, and in my attempts to read them, I can actually see progress being made. I'm quite pleased.

This is NOT a book to teach you spanish verbs. It does represent a vast amount of USEFUL terms and phrases. I love this book, and use it more than any other Spanish book I own. In my opinion, it is one of the most readable learning books out there.

I own many Learn-Spanish books, however I want to become more fluent. This means you should know 2000 words. This is where this book fills a niche. It may well be my best vocabulary book yet. Good features of this book include: - Using the word in a sentence. - Presenting words in logical groups,, business, dinning, etc. - Basic words listed in white, and more advanced spanish words listed in blue. Very helpful because I can focus on the basic vocabulary, thus making better use of my learning time.I would love to see more in the 'false friends' notes. I would like to see words that are spelled similar but are different, such as cansado and casado, encuentro, encuentra. Common words with similar spellings are a trouble spot for learners.

This is wonderful book for reviewing vocabulary. You should also know that French, German, and Italian versions exist as well. The words covered are very helpful, especially for those who like to travel and need to know "easy" words that do not appear frequently in literature but do come up often in offices, stores, etc. Each entry offers a clear example of usage in its proper context. These books are so inexpensive, that it is worth taking one with you on a trip abroad, even if you end up abandoning it at the end to make more room in your suitcase for the books that you want to bring home.