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Rating: 
Summary: Poorly composed and edited.
Review: Preparing for a trip to Mexico I focused on this book only to find that it was poorly composed. The irritations I had were:
1. Many of the chapters were not picked to be of as much use as I would like: e.g., Camping, A Trip by Train, The Beauty Shop, The Shoemaker and the Optometrist. 2. A dictionary is a separate book but it doesn't have all of the words that are in the Learn Spanish lesson book. 3. There is no index for being able to go back to certain words or grammatical subjects when you wish to refresh your memory. 4. The pages in the back of the book are supposed to be used for "flash cards", having a question on the front of them and supposedly the answer on the back of the flash card, but most of the flash cards have answers on the back that correspond to questions on one of the other flash cards, which makes most of them unusable. The pictures are useful but not particularly well done. Overall I was very disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice middle ground between a textbook and a phrase book.
Review: This book seems to be a nice compromise between courses that just teach you a bunch of phrases and the highly rigorous treatment of the language found in textbooks. I used this as part of a conversational Spanish course a couple of years back (the course used the book for Spanish I and II. I am working through the book again at a slower pace (the courses were very fast moving) and feel like I am getting enough of a foundation to either pick up the rest of the language "on the fly" or to move on to more serious study. The focus of the book is on the traveller, with chapters on things like "at the hotel", "in the market", "time and seasons" etc. However, plenty of language structure is worked in along the way to give a little bit of meat to the material. The book deals only with the present tense forms of the verbs so if you are looking for something more comprehensive, you will need to supplement your study elsewhere.
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