Sabias Que: Beginning Spanish

I used Sabias Que my junior and senior years of college, and thought it was a very good textbook. There are lots of articles, interviews, photos, paintings and essays about Latin culture. The book, and accompanying workbook, take an easy pace, and the vocabulary (as well as verb conjugation) is provided in easy-to-use charts. I recommed this to anyone interested in learning Spanish.

its a spanish book, i needed it for class, and it was much cheaper here than in the bookstore

The first edition of SQ blasted onto the market nearly 10 years ago and broke ALL the rules. It's a gutsy, interesting book that does what most other first year Spanish textbooks fail to do - gets you students using and understanding Spanish from the beginning of the school year! It is not easy to teach from Sabias que - you're going to have to work as hard as your students are, but the rewards will be amazing! This is not a teach-yourself Spanish text. It is meant for classroom use.

This text is very informative. There are some pieces of cultural information about the Spanish-speaking world that give good insight into that culture. The one aspect of the book that I thought was not very useful, was the numerous group or team activities, because there are more activities than can be accomplished. (If the class time consists of three 50-minute sessions per week, and there are roughly 15 weeks per semester, the student doesn't benefit from these since most cannot be accomplished effectively due to time constraints.) If a few, rather than many, had been selected for the text, then not only could these be completed during class, but there would be more room in the text for other cultural passages.