Scoobs Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5473 days ago 27 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Persian
| Message 1 of 5 22 July 2010 at 7:08pm | IP Logged |
I got the Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Vocabulary book(by Dorothy Richmond)the other week and I really like it. It combines a bit of grammar with the vocab which I find really useful. I was planning on buying the Italian version and maybe the French and German ones afterwards, but when I was reading the Amazon reviews, they all said that the Italian, French & German books weren't as good as the Spanish one. It's really put me off buying them now. My question is whether anyone on here has the books and are they any good? Also, do they combine grammar and vocabulary like the Spanish version?
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dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin
| Message 2 of 5 22 July 2010 at 11:54pm | IP Logged |
I'm 7 chapters into PMP Complete French Grammar and I've got 4 other PMP French books waiting on my shelf. I like it because of the variety of exercizes, including English => French translation, and it has lots of example sentences. Definitely more useful for active comprehension practice, compared to other texts. I can't compare the French books to PMP books for other languages, though.
Although there are some vocabulary lists in the PMP grammar books I wouldn't recommend them to beginners. Practice Makes Perfect: French Vocabulary would be the one to start with, I suppose. I don't have that one because I used Mastering French Vocabulary by Fischer and Plouhinec.
Edited by dolly on 22 July 2010 at 11:55pm
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dglass48 Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5606 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: German, Italian, French
| Message 3 of 5 23 July 2010 at 1:39am | IP Logged |
I have worked through the Italian and German "Sentence Builder" volumes and found both quite challenging, but useful. I find Ed Swick who wrote all of the German PMPs to be a reliable guide.
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ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5952 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian
| Message 4 of 5 23 July 2010 at 3:33am | IP Logged |
I have gone through most of the PMP Spanish Vocabulary and all of the Italian and some of the French one (and the German one is sitting on my shelf, waiting to be used). I skipped over all of the grammar sections in the Spanish book, but they looked quite useful for someone who is still learning grammar. The French and Italian books do have a little bit of grammar coverage, but it's very limited, and is mostly related to how to derive new words from ones you already know with suffixes. This wasn't a problem for me as I've already learned the grammar for all of these languages and the advanced vocabulary was what I was after. However, I must say that the Spanish book definitely covered the most material with must more comprehensive lists. I still think the French and Italian (and presumably the German) editions are worth buying, but don't expect as much as the Spanish one. Just as an example, the Spanish book is 436 pages while the French, Italian, and German books are only 212, 213, and 194 pages respectively.
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4940 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 5 of 5 30 November 2010 at 12:16am | IP Logged |
Hey roger...
Grumpy guy here.
You know, a single post would have been sufficient. No need to post the same thing 5 times all over the place.
R.
==
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