Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced Spanish Grammar | 
 enlarge | Author: Rogelio Alonso Vallecillos
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 14206
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7.3 x 0.5
ISBN: 0071472681
Dewey Decimal Number: 468.2421
EAN: 9780071472685
ASIN: 0071472681
Publication Date: April 10, 2008
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Product Description
Take your Spanish grammar skills to the next level and speak with more soltura! To fully understand how to speak Spanish effectively you must move beyond the fundamental principles of grammar and tackle more sophisticated sentence constructions. Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced Spanish Grammar focuses on intermediate- to advanced-level topics to help you create more complex, meaningful sentences and communicate more naturally. Instead of just applying sets of rules, Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced Spanish Grammar helps you better understand the nuances of the language and develop your skills and confidence as a Spanish speaker by providing easy-to-absorb explanatory materials, examples, and exercises. Inside you will find: - Thorough explanations of topics that often prove difficult for English speakers when they learn Spanish, such as the correct use of object pronouns.
- Practical exercises that give you the opportunity to test what you've learned
Learn the ins and outs of:
Some/any and quantity determiners • Adverbs • Problematic prepositions • Relative pronouns • Idiomatic constructions • . . . and much more
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| Customer Reviews:
Very helpful!! July 30, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
~I have just finished going through the book and I have found it to be very helpful and it does indeed go over a lot of nitty gritty things as the other reviewer stated. It is assumed here that you are already fairly good with verb tenses and that you have a decent vocabulary in the language, but that's expected... Like the other Spanish Practice Makes Perfect books I've gone through, this book has clear explanations followed by examples and lots of different exercises to help you practice what you've learned.
~I found almost everything to be helpful and organized, with hardy any noticeable errors(including the section at the back that has the answers to the exercises). There is one thing though about the last chapter that I wish would be changed a bit. It is not the content, but the way it is organized. The last chapter lists idiomatic expressions and is followed by exercises. Listed are the spanish expressions in bold and the explanations in english, but it is not in alphabetical order. This probably wouldn't bother everyone who goes over this section but I did like the expressions that were given and found I wanted to search for specific ones to see the meanings in english but had to keep flipping through back and forth and just would have found it more convenient if it was organized alphabetically.
~I'll go over some of the parts I liked the most or found the most useful:
~You'll learn how to phrase things in different ways, how to use conjunctions (practicing writing and reading sentences using words like : in spite of, despite, not only.. but also, however, otherwise, since, so, still/yet, therefore, when, while, for, both... and, either...or/neither...nor, besides, although, though, and, as, etc).
~Also a section on some/any and other determiners like when using algunas vs. unas, cualquier(a), poco/poca/unas cuantas, ambos/los dos, todos los dias/cada dia, ningun/ninguna, etc.
There's a chapter on commands and requests, one on using the passive voice "Juan esta pintando las paredes" [Juan is painting the walls)becomes "Las paredes estan siendo pintadas [por Juan]" (The walls are being painted [by Juan])
~I liked the section on problematic prepositions including : to and toward (which can be "hacia" or "a" or "para" in different sentences) , into ("en", "dentro de"), onto, out of, and off, across, over, through, up and down, over, above, below, under, etc.
~And the last section on idiomatic constructions has useful expressions that if directly translated to English would not completely make sense (eg."llover sobre mojado" refers to adding one problem to another problem but literally translated would be in English like, "To rain over wet".), probably the author chose some of the most popular or most used idioms. (I asked my boyfriend to star which ones were used in Puerto Rico specifically because he's Puerto Rican and I'm mostly interested in expressions that are used there and he told me most of them were used). I'm sure they're popular in other Spanish-speaking countries as well.
Well, this is another excellent, clear, and for the most part very organzied addition to the Practice Makes Perfect series with super useful chapters and exercises that in my opinion any intermediate or advanced student of Spanish should have & go through.
Extremely Useful Complimentary Grammar Book for Spanish Students May 27, 2008
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
This book on Spanish grammar is very useful. I wish I had it when I was studying Spanish in high school or college. It discusses so many nitty-gritty things that Spanish students struggle with.
When I first got it, I was under the impression that it would explain the past tenses, the subjunctive, etc. It's advanced Spanish grammar, right? When I read the table of contents, I was pleasently surprised to see that it discusses much more valuable information than just that. The following is its table of contents:
1. Object Pronouns and omission of subject pronouns
2. Some/any and other determiners
3. Adjectives
4. Adverbs
5. Commands & requests
6. Modal constructions
7. Impersonal sentences & the passive
8. Relative pronouns & conjunctions
9. Reported speech
10. Problematic prepositions I
11. Problematic prepositions II
12. Idiomatic constructions
Every chapter has very detailed information, along with exercises. My favorite chapters are the two that deal with prepostions. Prepositions are tricky in any language, and Spanish is no exception.
Having said all this, this book is not for absolute beginners. It's better suited to intermediate or advanced students. I majored in Spanish in college and find this book helpful. If I ever tutor students, I will probably refer to this text. So many of my students ask me questions that I don't always have the answer to. I simply "know without knowing." Now I can refer to this book when I need to.
Brandon Simpson
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