Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish All-in-One, Premium Third Edition

This book explains things well, gives many examples and has exercises to help solidify the concepts. It helps to have an answer key in the back. I'm not sure if this is the best book for a beginner because it covers a lot in a short space but it is great for me who studied Spanish in high school.

It's a very comprehensive study tool for Spanish learners. It includes grammar, reading, and various writing exercises. It also includes some online materials that I have not fully explored yet.

It was more than what i expected from a book . I love it

If you have no Spanish knowledge I wouldn’t start with this book. It goes straight into Spanish without even teaching the alphabet. I ordered it thinking it would start from the beginning an ended up ordering another book that actually starts with the alphabet so once I finish that I will get into this book.

I learned Spanish in high school, but haven't studied it in about 20 years. I would say that I have a fairly solid base understanding of the language - grammar, vocab, pronunciation, etc. I got this book to pick up my studies again, refresh and practice what I already know, and expand my knowledge. This book is perfect! I would not recommend this book for the absolute beginner with no knowledge of basic vocabulary. You'd likely spend half your time just looking up words to be able to understand the exercises in the activities - even starting in the first section. When I read the table of contents before I bought it I was expecting to just skip the first couple of chapters, assuming the book would be too simplistic. However, I was pleasantly surprised that so far it is great basic review and I've even learned a couple of things in terms of punctuation and capitalization. If one section starts to see overwhelming, I'd recommend jumping around a bit in the book as it doesn't feel exactly like a textbook that goes over the most simplistic items and moves to more difficult. Basics are scattered due to subject matter and how the sections are divided I would love if the answers to the exercises were bound in a separate book because flipping back and forth is a bit of a pain. However, I do understand that would increase the book cost and it's not a dealbreaker.

So I guess you could say it worked

found helpful

I am not sure who this book thinks its target audience is. It's more basic than is suitable for an advanced student who needs a refresh (I'm pretty sure we all know periods go at the end of a sentence), but not detailed enough for a complete beginner, who will be told to translate sentences and paragraphs with no vocabulary to reference. A translation dictionary would help, but (a) that's not exactly complete now is it and (b) it won't get a total beginner where they need to go to actually be able to use Spanish properly and confidently. I honestly don't know why this is so recommended amongst self-learners. Having self-taught multiple languages now and refreshed several others, I suspect it's the language learning community's aversion to formal instruction that leads them to reject proper textbooks out of hand. Do yourself a favour: get a textbook. Go to your local community college, find out what text they use. Any of them will be better suited to learning grammar and vocabulary than whatever this mess is. Yes, it will be more expensive. At least double the price, most likely, and it will require yearly renewal if you're a slow learner who needs more than a year to study grammar. The benefits of a structured learning system are worth the expense. They'll allow you to simply sit down with the book and know what you're working on, rather than constantly wondering if you're supposed to have another supplementary item that's never mentioned.