Advanced Spanish Grammar

You can take Spanish to the highest levels with this advanced guide to Spanish grammar. You should be aware up front that there's almost no English used in this book at all. The only English used in the text of the book appears to be the 3-page

preface, and, of course the definitions of the Spanish vocabulary words. Apart from these 2 exceptions, you're on your own. All the notes, explanations, and teaching are done in Spanish. Like the title says, this is a book for advanced Spanish students. This all Spanish text is a form of Spanish immersion, and is done on purpose. Studies have shown that students learn a lot more Spanish this way. (Even if it's more difficult at first.) The sub-title of the book is 'A Self-Teaching Guide'. This text would be suitable for a self learner as well as for a college-level Spanish class.

The book contains 26 lessons, and there are some features or components, that each of the lessons has:

• Notes - several points of teaching are always given here related to the vocabulary and topic of the lesson
• There's an 'Attention' section that points out and teaches you about problematic words that occur in Spanish. Both attention and notes are followed by exercises for you to practice what you've learned and test your knowledge. The types of exercise include fill in the blank, sentence completion, dialog fill-in, and matching.

Immediately after new material is presented, you have an opportunity to test yourself and make sure you've mastered it. The author strongly recommends not moving on if you get more than a few of the test questions wrong. At every quiz/test area, they tell you what page in the answer section to turn to in order to grade yourself.

The book has 26 lessons and at about every 7 lessons they put a major exam covering the previous sections. These are matching, fill in the blank, underline the correct answer, etc. All the correct answers are included here too.

The main aspect that sets this book apart from the others in the fact that it's all in Spanish. It's a book for English speakers who are learning Spanish, and the authors decided to use this method to help the student. It's kind of like the Spanish immersion people do when they want to learn Spanish so they spend a month in a Spanish speaking country where they have to speak only Spanish. So, while this may be more difficuly, especially at first, it's a very efficient method of becoming a better Spanish speaker.

It's common for grammar books to base the chapter titles on the grammatical parts of speech and have typical chapter titles like Nouns, Adjectives, Regular Verbs, etc. This book takes a different and more interesting approach. It's still a grammar book but each chapter is titled after a situation where Spanish would be spoken. Scenarios like at you favorite restaurant, at the movie theater, and at the clothing store. The effect is to make the book less dry, more fun to use. And, of course, if you're using it for self study, you can skip around to the topics that interest you.

And although the book is organized mainly around these situational dialogs, you can still find the grammatical topic you're interested in learning about by looking in the table of contents. Here under the dialog theme, you find all the grammar presented in that chapter. (Such as Present Indicative Tense). The effect is to provide the topic of grammar in a more approachable, fun, and practical way.