Mastering Spanish Vocabulary: A Thematic Approach (Mastering Vocabulary Series)

Truly a "thematic" approach. Grouped clearly by category. Gives English example with Spanish equivalent, and how to use the word in context. Not just a dictionary.

My item arrived in a fair amount of time and the book is decent. It is broken up in to different categories and some words are repeated in more than 1 section, but with alternate meanings. Not bad at all . . .

Barron's series Mastering Vocabulary is a great tool for language learners! As another reviewer points out, this is not a book for teaching yourself grammar. It is, though, a great way to move on from knowing the basics to being competent in the language.

Using a normal course, such as one in the Colloqial series, you will end up with knowing the grammar relatively well and with a vocabulary of 1500 words. That's a good start, but you need to know more words to get moving. The Mastering Vocabulary series is a great help along the way. By doing one chapter each week, you will know more than 7000 words after half a year. That is enough to live in a language where the language is spoken and use it in all everyday interactions and communication. My only real complaint with the series is that it's not available for more than four languages.

I have to admit that I've never had a Spanish lesson in my life, but I would really like to learn it, at least well enough to read Spanish books and magazines. While I've had French and have done considerable reading recently in that language, I have not had any serious exposure to Spanish vocabularly, so I purchased this volume to assist in developing a basic vocabularly. While I find it a little daunting, I'm surprised at how much I've been able to learn. The book is arranged in a manner that presents primarily nouns and adjectives in logical classes. The reader learns a word and its meaning and then sees how it is used in a sentance, thereby passively learning something of sentance structure and other word forms like verbs and adverbs. I find this method works well for me, because I really am a noun-adjective person more than a verb-adverb person. I can remember the concrete more thoroughly than I can actions and ideas, probably because I'm a visual person--not to mention a not very active one. I've purchased several children's books in Spanish: Lemony Snicket, Harry Potter, and the Spiderwich Chronicals, and in my attempts to read them, I can actually see progress being made. I'm quite pleased.

This is a great book to have if you're also pairing it with Breaking out of Beginner's Spanish, or something along that lines. Not for the one who is looking to buy Spanish for Dummies. However, it's categorized well, and very logical in its presentation.

If you ARE beginning Spanish study, this is a little too detailed for you. Get the major verb tenses and conjugations down first, and then buy this book after at least a year of class or self-study.

This is laid out for the older student - upper high school and adults. For the much younger student, Flip Flop Spanish is a good one for a simple approach as well.

Sra. Gose
Author of Flip Flop Spanish: Ages 3-5: Level 1 & Flip Flop Spanish: Ages 3-5: Level 2