Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Pronouns And Prepositions

 (82 customer reviews)

This book and the other Practice-Makes-Perfect workbook by Dorothy Richmond ("Spanish Verb Tenses") are the best Spanish books I've ever used. I just got back from 2 years in the Peace Corps in Honduras and I studied these books every day. They REALLY helped me learn more Spanish! In addition to the concise, easy-to-understand instruction sections, there's tons of exercises to do (with the correct answers in the back of the book) and as I did the exercises, I picked up all kinds of things that I'd been wondering how to say. I also liked this workbook a lot because it covered all those difficult things I never understood before, like how to use "lo que..", direct and indirect object pronouns, the passive voice, the difference between "para" and "por", and many other things. (This book is especially great if you already know some Spanish because you need some vocabulary to do the exercises, unless you don't mind looking up lots of words in...Read more

This review is going to be really simple. I completed the Spanish course at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. But I couldn't have done it without this book.It is hands-down the best one on the market for Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions. And WHAT A VALUE!!!What's best? The authors leave enough space to write in the book. And at this price, you will want to write all over it. I have had less luck with workbooks that ask for a paragraph, but make you enter it in your own notebook.Also there is a good glossary at the end of the book so you can easily look up unknown words without having to lug your dictionary around. I can't say enough good. Buy it.

For the price, this book can make a valuable contribution to everyone's goal of learning Spanish, but though I welcomed the practice, I did not feel the methodology was outstanding. For example, in each exercise you are basically limited to the grammatical point you have just read about so you don't really have to challenge yourself to recall what you learned 15 pages earlier. I think the translation exercises in the preposition section could have incorporated more pronouns to multiply practice, for example. So you finish the exercises using "lo que" and you think you have it, but that is usually because you do not revisit it later. There are no comprehensive exercises. In the preposition section there is much discussion distinguishing por and para, however in my mind I don't see much of a helpful distinction between one's purpose for doing something and one's motivation for doing something (which we are told is how you may to choose between the two in some instances). Also, we...Read more