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Hugo Language Course: Latin American Spanish In Three Months
From the depths of deepest Peru to the bustling streets of Havana, one language binds all. With this pack you too should be able to gain a working knowledge of Latin American Spanish as three 70-minute CDs - narrated by native speakers - guide you through the carefully structured, week-by-week course. Whether you are buying cocktails in the Dominican Republic or watching Mexican soap operas, with this pack you should feel confident in understanding and speaking this language.
- GenresLanguage
255 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1994
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October 18, 2021
I worked through this book diligently for three months. I think it could be a useful resource to some people learning Spanish in certain situations, but it didn't do much for me.
I had taken Spanish in college, all the way through Spanish IV, in which I earned an A from a very tough teacher (I heard I may have been the only student to ever earn an A in any of his classes). My Spanish was good enough I could communicate fairly fluently with my Mexican coworkers at the restaurant I worked at through college. After college, I moved to Japan for three years, learned Japanese, forgot Spanish. After returning to the States I moved to a neighborhood with a large Latino population. I worked through this book (which had been in storage for many years) to brush up on my Spanish. I found it tedious and frustrating, and only helped improve my Spanish at the margins.
Organization. The sequence in which topics are introduced doesn't make much sense. Complex grammatical structures come before basic vocabulary, which makes it difficult to apply what you're learning--you get the structure before you have the words to put into it.
Tedious exercises. About 90 percent of the exercises in the book are "Translate these 10 to 18 sentences." These exercises were difficult as one has trouble literally translating a sentence. When learning a language naturally, you tend to use simpler grammar or vocabulary to get the point across, rather than attempt to create a perfectly correct sentence. The emphasis is on function, rather than form. There were only a few matching or fill-in-the-blank exercises. The similarity of the exercises was tedious, and the emphasis on exact translation was demotivating.
Complex grammar. Related to the organization issue, one can read this book and not know how to order in a restaurant. There is little of the "survival" Spanish many books would start with, and instead there is the pluperfect subjunctive. One would need advanced linguistic knowledge to recognize the pluperfect subjunctive in their own language. These are the sort of things native speakers sense when they "sound right" that are hard to teach. Maybe it was a fool's errand to try to learn Spanish with a book in three months, but the author could have focused on a solid foundation rather than jumping so quickly to difficult grammatical concepts without explaining what they are. The example sentences were helpful, but not that much.
Who would I recommend this book to?
I would actually recommend this book to people with a decent grasp of Spanish who find themselves immersed in a Spanish-speaking country. I do think this would be useful in the "margins" in filling in the gaps of what you don't know, make sense of sentence and grammatical structures you are hearing around you, and learning the nuance of idioms. While this book is not for the casual learner, to a certain audience, it could be a useful resource.
I had taken Spanish in college, all the way through Spanish IV, in which I earned an A from a very tough teacher (I heard I may have been the only student to ever earn an A in any of his classes). My Spanish was good enough I could communicate fairly fluently with my Mexican coworkers at the restaurant I worked at through college. After college, I moved to Japan for three years, learned Japanese, forgot Spanish. After returning to the States I moved to a neighborhood with a large Latino population. I worked through this book (which had been in storage for many years) to brush up on my Spanish. I found it tedious and frustrating, and only helped improve my Spanish at the margins.
Organization. The sequence in which topics are introduced doesn't make much sense. Complex grammatical structures come before basic vocabulary, which makes it difficult to apply what you're learning--you get the structure before you have the words to put into it.
Tedious exercises. About 90 percent of the exercises in the book are "Translate these 10 to 18 sentences." These exercises were difficult as one has trouble literally translating a sentence. When learning a language naturally, you tend to use simpler grammar or vocabulary to get the point across, rather than attempt to create a perfectly correct sentence. The emphasis is on function, rather than form. There were only a few matching or fill-in-the-blank exercises. The similarity of the exercises was tedious, and the emphasis on exact translation was demotivating.
Complex grammar. Related to the organization issue, one can read this book and not know how to order in a restaurant. There is little of the "survival" Spanish many books would start with, and instead there is the pluperfect subjunctive. One would need advanced linguistic knowledge to recognize the pluperfect subjunctive in their own language. These are the sort of things native speakers sense when they "sound right" that are hard to teach. Maybe it was a fool's errand to try to learn Spanish with a book in three months, but the author could have focused on a solid foundation rather than jumping so quickly to difficult grammatical concepts without explaining what they are. The example sentences were helpful, but not that much.
Who would I recommend this book to?
I would actually recommend this book to people with a decent grasp of Spanish who find themselves immersed in a Spanish-speaking country. I do think this would be useful in the "margins" in filling in the gaps of what you don't know, make sense of sentence and grammatical structures you are hearing around you, and learning the nuance of idioms. While this book is not for the casual learner, to a certain audience, it could be a useful resource.
Displaying 1 of 1 review