Spanish Among Amigos

Do you want to fit in when you speak Spanish? Do you want to sound like the native Spanish speakers? Most people do. Nobody wants to sound like a dry, boring textbook.

That's where this book called Spanish Among Amigos comes in. This book has the coolest dialogues around - Lots of slang, lots of real Spanish that real people use.

The book describes itself as being in contrast to the boring textbooks that are used in Spanish classrooms. It's full of lively, real Spanish, that's actually being used by native Spanish speakers daily.

Sometimes people take a few years of Spanish instruction, do some studying on their own, and feel like they know Spanish fairly well. Then, when they begin to spend more and more time with native Spanish speakers, they find that they don't understand what's being said.

And that's where this book can help. It's got 21 units, each with a spontaneous, irreverent, very informal conversation that 2 close friends would have.

Here are a couple of bits and pieces from the dialogs to give you an idea what they're like. "get a load of...", "tell me about it...", "a real ripoff...", "there are these two shady types...". This is the style of the dialogs. Very informal. They're great conversations. The flavor of the conversations is spicy. They sound like what you might hear in a college dorm. The cover of the book has a sub title: "Conversational Spanish Beyond The Classroom". I can't say enough about how informal and hip the conversations are. These are fun, entertaining dialogues to use between the closest of friends.

After each chapter-opening dialog, you get some exercises to send it home. A multiple choice to test your comprehension. Then they handle the vocabulary words highlighting important words and phrases for that unit. A lot of units have some special teaching of Spanish language principles, for example the use of the infinitive form. They also have fill in the blank, and word matching. And don't worry if you have a hard time filling in some of the answers in all the practice material because there's an answer key at the back.

At the end of the book is a Spanish English glossary. Here you'll find a nice list of the words and phrases used in the book with the page numbers of the dialogs that contain them.