Spanish Verbs (Barron's Verb Series)

Other reviews describe this book's 300 verbs as a "scaled-down version of the 501-verb" publication. But in fact, this book actually contains 1,300 verbs!

How can this be? Because of so-called reference verbs. For example the verb poner means "to put, place." But other verbs such as componer (to compose), suponer (to suppose) and exponer (to expose) have identical conjugations, except for the prefix. If you look up one of these in the index, you will be referred to the page number of the base verb, poner. As I said, this book contains 1,000 such references.

Barron's Spanish verbs contains other useful indices as well, such as the very handy "Index of common irregular spanish verb forms identified by infinitive." This is very handy for confusing, stem-changing (radical-changing) verbs.

Also included is an English-to-Spanish verb dictionary, which can stand in for a general Spanish dictionary, since Spanish verbs can so readily morph into nouns.

I find this book very useful, along with "Oxford Spanish Verbs" AKA "Oxford Spanish Verbpack." That book has 4,000 verbs, consisting of 92 verbs fully conjugated, plus the list of reference verbs.

You can buy both books without breaking the bank.

I can tell you from a brutal 18 years of experience as a Spanish student, 99% of the challenge in speaking Spanish is learning to deal with the verb conjugations. You will get absolutely nowhere until you get some rudimentary ability with that. You must learn to relate the conjugated verb that you hear to its infinitive. Thus if you hear "corremos," you need to recognize that that is a form of the verb "correr," which means "to run." It's not easy and the problem is made soo annoyingly worse by the fact that you will not find the conjugated verb forms in any Spanish dictionary. Thus if you are reading a book and you want to look up "corro" (I run), you will find no such word in the dictionary...you will only find "correr," but if you don't understand that "corro" is a form of "correr," then you are totally hosed. 501 Spanish Verbs by Christopher Kendris is largely a valuable dictionary of verbs along with their conjugated forms (something you will not find elsewhere), but the real jewel of the book is a 30 page primer on Spanish grammar. 30 pages is much easier to read and digest than some 500 page Spanish textbook, but also probably gives you 100% of what you will ever need to know...in only 30 pages. I spoke and listened to Spanish every day for a solid year without making much progress. Then someone loaned me this book and I made great progress after that.

One correction to the book: Gustar is a problem for English speaking students of Spanish because it's used backwards of the way we phrase the corresponding concept in English. This book has a poor handling of this word and I can suggest something more useful. "Gustar" is often defined as "to like" as in "to like something" as in "I like you" or "I like food." That's not a good definition because the verb is not conjugated that way. For example, if you think of "gustar" as "to like," the sentence "I like you," would be something like "Me gusto a ti," attempting to conjugate "gustar" to "I like" as "gusto." But that actually means something close to "you like me," the opposite of what was intended. The actual sentence would be "Me gustas." Again if you think of "gustar" as "to like," "gustas" would seem to mean "you like" and the example sentence would seem to mean "you like me," again the opposite of what it actually means. All of that is so confusing, but the confusion is somewhat needless.

Instead, "gustar" should be thought of as "to please" and the student needs to learn to phrase the English concept this way before translating to Spanish. Thus the common phrase "I like you" needs to be phrased as "you please me," leading more easily to the correct conjugation of "gustas" meaning "you please." 501 Spanish verbs does mention "to please" in the defintion, but it also defines it as "to like" and that leads to confusion. Moreover, the conjugations listed for this verb are not complete and thus many needed conjugations are ignored. For example, "gustas" is not listed, along with many more. Unfortunately I can not list here the 50 needed conjugations...you're on your own for that!

This book is outstanding at the high school level. Five stars for high school. However, the book only covers the basics, so one needs a much more extensive book if one has a strong, continuing interest in the language.

I just got my book a couple of weeks ago. I give it an ok rating, but definitely not a great rating. I personally didn't rate it higher because there are a number of key verbs that are not listed that i personally needed. I speak spanish at a very high level, but i am not fluent yet. But anyone who speaks or is learning to speak spanish knows that the verbs are everything, and i was hoping to shore up my spanish with learning all the tenses of verbs which i hear people use when they talk to me in everyday conversation that i didn't have a firm grasp of. That's where i was hoping that this book would fill in my final missing pieces, to which it does to some degree because there are lots of the important verbs there,and listed in all tenses which is great. It's just that it seems a lot of the ones that i was hoping to see aren't there. But never the less a good book, but definitely not for beginners, but for people with a good grasp of spanish already.

Spanish verbs is a great book for beginning and even intermediate Spanish learners. At the beginning, there is a thorough overview of the uses of all of the Spanish tenses. After that, there are hundreds of fully conjugated verbs with general definitions and examples of each verb. This is especially useful with irregular verbs. Spanish Verbs not only delivers the information on each tense but also gives conjugated examples of some very useful verbs. I highly recommend this book to the beginning and intermediate Spanish learner because it clearly states the uses and delivers the conjugations in a standard, organized order. Plus, all verbs are in alphabetical order so no hassle. Be sure to purchase this book; it will enhance your Spanish whether you are looking for an introduction to Spanish, a review of the verbs and verb forms, or simply as a reference to be used as needed.