501 Spanish Verbs: with CD-ROM (Barron's Foreign Language Guides)

Thank you. I needed this book right away and it came as promised.
Book was in great shape.

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 is a great book that will help all starting or even advanced speakers with their spanish verbs tenses. make Spanish class easier to pass with this book.

I took an evening Spanish 101 at the local university a few months back, and bought about a dozen different reference books that I thought I would need as a class supplement. Yes I like to go overboard. Pretty much from the first day of class on, there were only 2 supplements that I used constantly, the others never got touched. Those books were this book and the Collins Spanish Concise Dictionary; and they got used a lot. Until you've gotten to a fairly advanced level, I would save your money and stick with those 2 books.

Great addition to any library for those of us studying the language. I recommended it as a useful study resource which could have benefited from better editing by the publisher. For example, the conjugation of the verb cepillar is obviously flawed.