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Spanish Language Textbook Suggestion | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 9 of 12 24 August 2013 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Blabla, if you were to choose one edition, which one would you go for?
Have you found anything outdated in the older versions? Have you used Assimil for other languages as well? I wonder whether it is only my impression that the Spanish one is a bit "worse" than some others. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BlaBla Triglot Groupie Spain Joined 4130 days ago 45 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English, French Studies: Nepali, Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin | Message 10 of 12 24 August 2013 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Long reply, you asked for it, lol. It really depends. If speaking is your primary objective and you have some french under your belt, at least B1 I'd say, I'd pick the new 'L'Espagnol sans peine' without thinking twice. As mentioned above it's heavy on dialogues, most of them pretty funny, some downright hilarious. The vocabulary index lists some 2500 words (quick count) in both languages. Good stuff. The old "Spanisch ohne Mühe" (© 1954 for the German edition) or "Spanish without toil" (©1940/1957) are filled to the brim with useful content and lengthy explanations. Some few expressions may seem a bit dusty after all those years but I personally don't believe that they can get in the way of anything. Pretty much the good old Spanish used in some older movies like 'Casablanca' and the like. Lots of 'Usted' and 'Ustedes' instead of 'tu'. Nothing wrong with that and no big deal if you ask me, but then I'm no expert by any means, just an average student on my way to B1. I'm perfectly OK with those old editions. The 1984 edition sticks out though. As mentioned before it sports some critical (IMO) amount of odd, exotic vocabulary to a point that I can't remember having used some of those words in my native language ... ever. One of them didn't even show up in my 300000 word dictionary. Big OUCH. Add a handful of poems, each taking up a whole chapter and you get the idea. At the risk of repeating myself ... this is supposed to be a beginners course and while I have a nice collection of Spanish survival phrasebooks around to cover my basic needs I would have prefered a somewhat more appropiate selection of words in that edition. On the other hand though it confronts you with some rather long sentence constructions and useful idioms here and there that finally kept me interested enough to make it through a third wave. I certainly don't have much to regret. Now, with those 3 editions at my disposal and the third wave through #2 nearly finished I'm happily looking forward to spend the rest of this year assimilating all the goodies they have to offer, rather than wasting my time with "Spanisch in der Praxis" or the infamous English translation. I have those here too, beautiful little hardcopies, but rather have a solid footing in the language than adding ...loads of stuff I probably won't ever use. Just my 2 €cts - YMMV. I need to be basically fluent (B1+) by the end of this year, mainly for the job, so wish me luck folks :) Regarding other languages I went through Assimil's Japanese (1&2) and Italian ("Italienisch ohne Mühe") as well as some of their French titles to keep my French from rusting too much but as mentioned above, I wouldn't use ANY single title as a sole resource but rather as something like a mainstay or something of that sort. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BlaBla Triglot Groupie Spain Joined 4130 days ago 45 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English, French Studies: Nepali, Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin | Message 11 of 12 26 August 2013 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Back OT, just let me add some of my favorite books:
* Lonely Planet Spanish Phrasebook - survival phrases and vocab that aren't covered in the 3 Assimils, my mainstays. * Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish - a most wonderful resource (google), albeit in regard to sentence structures Assimil will take you much further. * Langenscheidts Kurzgrammatik Spanisch - indispensable compact grammar book with excellent explanations * 'A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish' by Mark Davies. I really love this book. Each lemma comes with a sample sentence and there is a good number of extra word lists (verbs, adjectives, ..., body parts, animals, ...) sorted by their frequency rank. * 'Breaking out of Beginner's Spanish' by J.Keenan. I'm just starting with this one but so far it looks very promising. * Michael Thomas pdfs. Download them free and legal while they last. They contain most of the sentences that Michael used on the CDs, without getting interrupted by that strange male student. I found them excellent for basic L1>L2 translation drills (same as with the exercises in Madrigal's Magic Key). After having finished the CDs I didn't miss the Master's voice ('quiääääärrrääah') and those two students too much, lol. Have I forgotten anything ? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4910 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 12 of 12 26 August 2013 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I didn't know you could download the Michel Thomas booklets. Thank you.
For those who are interested, the link is: http://www.michelthomas.com/downloads.php 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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