Spanish Resource Report Card

Some grades for the different resources I have used in my attempt to learn Spanish.

Pimsleur Spanish I, II, III (A). Great stuff. They do a really good job of repeating older material to keep you from forgetting previous lessons. My only gripe is that the way in which words are introduced seems a little random sometimes. For example, I have no idea why they would bother teaching me how to say “engineer”. Some of the conversations are priceless though:

“I’m going to drink 3 beers.”

“In half an hour?”

“I like beer.”

I really like the series but the main problem is that I have no idea how to write or read anything which led me to purchase the following book.

Spanish: The Easy Way (C-). Generally, I am a little hesitant to buy books with these types of titles. You know, the “Learn C++ In 7 Minutes” type of book. I mean, if it was really that easy everybody would do it during that 5 minute half-asleep/half-awake window before finally dozing off and there wouldn’t be a frigging giant row of books on the subject. See now, if someone wrote a book called “Spanish: This Shit Is Hard”, I’d be all over that. Of course, it’s not fair to judge a book by its cover and I’m sure the content is actually fabulous in some of these. I got this one mainly because the layout looked nice and there were a lot of pictures.

But unfortunately, this book kind of blows. My main gripe is that the answers in the back sometimes seem to be referring to a completely different question (although perhaps I am just truly clueless). This is a little disappointing considering that this is the 4th edition. Sometimes the answers require grammatical knowledge that hasn’t been introduced yet. Also annoying is that some of the blank spaces in the exercises are about this long ____ and you are supposed to write in an uber long answer.