Practice Makes Perfect: Basic Spanish, Second Edition (2015)

Practice Makes Perfect: Basic Spanish is an effective companion text to whatever book(s) you may be using in your first- or second-year Spanish class. This highly useful workbook is well suited for middle school and high school students.

This book is not meant to introduce concepts or to be the primary teaching tool. Rather, its purpose is to reinforce what has been presented already, whether by a teacher’s instruction or in a formal textbook. Very basic grammar is presented, typically in charts, as preparation for the material covered in the exercises. Exercises use the present tense exclusively. This choice of present tense is contextually appropriate, even when historical figures are mentioned.

The easiest way to know what to expect from Practice Makes Perfect: Basic Spanish is to scan the Contents. There you will find the grammatical concepts and vocabulary topics covered.

Grammatical concepts are emphasized more than vocabulary, as every student needs to master these one at a time and to relative completion. Vocabulary, on the other hand, is an ongoing process, frequently dictated by the student’s particular interests and needs.

Also presented, in the early chapters, is crucial everyday vocabulary that helps the beginning student express himself or herself more clearly and authentically, even early in the process of learning to speak, write, and read Spanish.

Below is a quick list of what this book provides:

♦ Reinforcement for concepts already presented in another format or setting

♦ An emphasis on broad, basic concepts—not grammatical minutiae

♦ An emphasis on the informal you (tú and vosotros)—in exercises, you is assumed to be the singular familiar form tú and you all is assumed to be the plural familiar form vosotros

♦ Useful vocabulary lists for a variety of topics

♦ More than 300 entertaining exercises dealing with the basic structure of the Spanish language

♦ A broad range of fun exercises (true/false, fill in the blank, translations, “Who am I?”, etc.)

♦ Exercise content infused with famous and popular people and characters, both current and historical

♦ Ten sets of exercises—called Cumulativos—each of which tests the information gleaned from the previous five lessons in a comprehensive way

♦ A final set of translation exercises that tests the cumulative knowledge acquired through each of the ten parts of this book

♦ Answers to all exercises

♦ A glossary that draws together vocabulary from throughout the book

The second edition of this book is supported by a free app (see www.mhlanguagelab.com for details) that contains

♦ flashcard sets of the vocabulario panels throughout the book

♦ a Spanish-English/English-Spanish digital glossary

♦ audio recordings by native Spanish speakers of most of the Answer key, focused on exercises that require full sentences in Spanish as responses.

Spanish is a beautiful language that you can appreciate and enjoy more fully by mastering the fundamentals of its structure. This workbook will help you achieve your goals in a user-friendly, student-driven fashion.

¡Buena suerte!