On 2009-12-02 James Williams, San Diego, CA wrote: This is James from James Spanish (the learning Spanish blog).
Along with a comprehensive language course and Spanish dictionary a grammar reference is a must-have tool if you are serious about learning Spanish. The New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish is one of the most comprehensive books available, dealing with a huge range of grammatical elements of the Spanish language. The book is written in an easy to understand and clear language and boasts a clean and simple layout, allowing students to use it quickly and easily.
The key benefit to this book is that is present Spanish grammar as it is currently being spoken around the world. The focus is on the way that rules are applied by modern speakers, providing a realistic reference tool for real-life conversations with native speakers. Language is flexible, changing over time, and this book highlights grammatical rules that are being bent or broken by contemporary speakers. The observations are accompanied by examples and quotes from popular authors, newspapers and other media sources, giving interesting illustrations and evidence of current usage trends. These exerpts make fascinating reading for any student who is interested in the evolution of linguistics and likes to complement their study of the Spanish language with more cultural and social background information into how it is used.
A glossary at the back provides help with many of the words used in the book, although this does not substitute for a solid understanding of English and Spanish grammar, making this book unsuitable for early beginners.
The book is highly detailed, and geared more at intermediate to advanced students who have a genuine interest in grammar, rather than an all round reference book, but still provides a great deal of valuable information. Covering tiny grammar details often overlooked by other texts, it is an invaluable tool for cross referencing grammar elements that you might come across in modern written texts and can´t find in conventional dictionaries or verb tables. A great tool for advanced students, the book even pays close attention to Castillian Spanish as well as Latin American, making it suitable for students of both regional dialects.
The book´s layout is easy to navigate, with bi-lingual translations on each page and a well laid out format and index letting you turn to it for reference quickly and easily.
In closing my review of this product, I´d like to share with you the three Amazon products that I have found most helpful in my pursuit to learn Spanish. If you are truly serious about achieving fluency, I´d recommend getting all 3 of them if you can afford it.
1. Lights, Camera, Spanish (Book + DVD): Learn Conversational Spanish by Watching a Romantic Adventure This is actually a 90 minute movie for Spanish-language learners. It gives the option to watch the movie with subtitles but I´d recommend not using them to improve your Spanish. This ´movie´ also includes a workbook so that you can reinforce the Spanish vocabulary words and phrases from the film. The workbook also has lots of exercises to keep you engaged in the film. But be prepared to hear Chilean accents. Although pleasent to the ear, the accents from Chile are very different from most Latin American accents.
2. Verbarrator Version 1.1 (Windows Version) This software replaces the traditional verb conjugation books and makes learning how to conjugate Spanish verbs an interactive and fun activity. This should be a required resource for anyone who wants to improve their ability to conjugate Spanish verbs. Especially anyone who is challenged by the drudgery of learning how to conjugate Spanish verbs and who is looking for a new way to make learning how to conjugate Spanish verbs an easy and fun activity
3. Diccionario esencial de la lengua espanola de la Real Academia Espanola (Spanish Edition) If you are really serious about speaking the language fluently, then at some point you will need to replace your Spanish-English dictionary and get a pure Spanish dictionary with both the vocabulary words and the definitions entirely in Spanish. I use this one only because it was highly-recommended by a friend from Spain who teaches Spanish. According to him, in academic circles in Spain as well as Latin America this Spanish dictionary is the standard.
. And summed up by saying A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish Review by James. Currently A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish has an overall rating of 10 over 10.
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McGraw-Hill claimed Recognized internationally as the most authoritative and comprehensive guide to contemporary Spanish for English speakers, A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish is an accessible, jargon-free guide to the forms and structures of Spanish as it is currently spoken and written. Examples from contemporary sources from throughout the Spanish-speaking world are used to illustrate grammatical points. Levels of usage--formal, familiar, colloquial, and popular--are indicated, and regional differences in usage are highlighted. This edition has been updated and revised to include the latest findings of the Royal Spanish Academy.
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