Teach Yourself Spanish: A Complete Course for Beginners

Have recently purchased this book and am very satisfied. It is very complete, covering the basics with dialogues supported by audio recordings. It also includes grammar rules that pop up in each chapter throughout the dialogues. The way it is built up is very clear and intuitive to me. I am a beginner, and just started chapter 4 now. I have bought Puentes, and practiced with Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur. Pimsleur (audio) takes too long, Rosetta stone (visual, sort of like 'memory' game) misses the basic dialogues and grammar rules, Puentes is useless without a teacher. For all those much more expensive courses...I find this method superiour. And it costs under 20 US$! Will visit South America in a few months, and this book really gets me up to a certain level fast by selfstudy before starting my spanish course there. Highly recommended!!

This is a pretty good introduction to Spanish. The course's 25 audio lessons are accompanied by a book with plenty of exercises to help you master the material that is on the audio lessons. The sound quality of the audio recordings are clear and easy to hear. The dialogs show that the author put a great deal of thought and creativity into this inexpensively priced course. Considering the book's price tag and content, I must give it 5 stars. But be aware of two things. Uno, this book is only meant to be an introductory course to Spanish. It will not make you conversational or fluent in Spanish. It will take a much greater investment in time and money before you reach fluency in Spanish. For the student seeking fluency in Spanish, especially, Latin American Spanish the best course for achieving that objective is Learning Spanish Like Crazy. Unlike the Spanish speakers in Learning Spanish Like Crazy, the speakers in Teach Yourself Spanish are from Spain and not Latin America. The English narrator in Teach Yourself Spanish also sounds as if she is from the U.K. The Spanish vocabulary words used in Teach Yourself Spanish are "neutral." But the Spanish accents are clearly European. That may or may not be an issue for you. I guess that all depends on how important it is to you to develop an authentic Latin American accent. Since I am interested in learning the Spanish of Spain just as much as I am interested in learning the Spanish of Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina and Costa Rica, I considered this a plus.

I have reviewed many learn Spanish C/D's, tapes, books, etc. I think this is probably one of the best programs out there. It is designed for people traveling in Spain and uses Castillan Spanish.

N.B. This review may not apply to first-time language learners, but if you already know another romance language then read on... While studying abroad in Italy, I took a trip to Spain for a week. I picked up the only book written in English about learning Spanish that I could find in Florence, and started going through the book about two weeks before I left for my trip. While in Spain, I spoke nothing but Spanish and had almost no communication problems. While Italian and Spanish are quite similar, I still think the book was great - it teaches you the structure of the language as well as vocabulary, allowing you to not just mindlessly repeat memorizations from a phrasebook, but instead successfully put together exactly what you want to say based on knowledge of the actual language. Highly, highly recommended!

I have an earlier edition of this book, but I assume not much has been changed in this edition. This book is a good, solid introduction to Spanish. It's not a quick fix - there's lots of grammar, vocab., dialogues, etc., but if you're willing to spend some time reading, memorizing, and practicing, this book has most of what you need to know to begin speaking grammatically correct Spanish.