Practice Makes Perfect:Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions, by Dorothy Richmond, is a very useful book to keep handy where you can pick it up for a few minutes now and then.

I got this book because I noticed that I was bogging down on sentences like “They gave him the book and he gave her a box of candy and him a pen.” Luckily, I’ve never had to say exactly that, but you get the idea.

And there is the matter of when to use para and when to use por. Thought I had it, till I got to Mexico and started hearing how the Mexicans use them. Or what about Qué? and Cuál… do you know when to use them?

I like the book mainly because the author, Dorothy Richmond, has a really clear way of explaining things.  It’s in a workbook format, with answers in the back.

Click on the image to go to Amazon, if you’d like an enjoyable way to get those Spanish pronouns and prepositions lined up right! You’ll see a green book cover. It’s been recently updated.

I remember glancing through a friend’s copy of Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish: A Creative and Proven Approach when I was a young woman living in Spain and studying Spanish with a tutor. In other words, this book has been around quite a while.

So I was a little surprised to see that it showed up at Amazon as one of the more popular books for self-study of Spanish. I took a look at the publisher’s blurb. Succinct, it is: “Anyone can read, write, and speak Spanish in only a few short weeks with this unique and proven method, which completely eliminates rote memorization and boring drills.”

At least that was a clue. I took a look at some of the numerous reader reviews. People tend to like it a lot. They say it emphasizes conversational Spanish… always one of my favorite topics.

They say a lot of other good things about it too. Take a look, if you’re at all curious:

I’ve been fascinated by the Kindle ever since it was announced, and now here is another reason to get one:

Amazon has a list of several dozen books to help you learn Spanish via a Kindle. Quite a few of them are very inexpensive, and some have text-to-speech enabled, I noticed, though I don’t know how good that is.

When Kindles came out, you could only buy them in the US but now they are available for many countries. I am pretty sure there is one in my future! Here is what the Kindle DX looks like and clicking on the image takes you to its sales page on Amazon, loaded with information, a couple of videos,  and more. If that price is steep for you, notice that there is a link to a less expensive version as well, on the Amazon page.

As a former librarian in public libraries, I have to admit that I am a big fan of the “For Dummies” books. They have a level of quality control that means you can trust them to be quite good, with very few exceptions in their hundreds (or is it now thousands?) of published books.

So I went to Amazon and did a search on Spanish for Dummies. Not surprisingly, readers generally like it though many of them point out that no one book is going to do everything for you. There are complaints about typos and the like, but I will spare you my librarianly rant on the lower standards of book publishing these days! Click to read more >>>

Recently I was looking around Amazon to see what their best-selling books were for learning Spanish.  I navigated the reference books section to the category Words & Language, and then to Linguistics.

Looking down the list for books in Spanish, the first two books I found were really cheap and could be useful. The first one got a lot of five-star reviews from readers, the second one a bit less.

[1] I remember this Dover book from when I was a librarian. At two dollars, a bargain… and a lot of vendors are selling copies for one penny (but they usually make up for it with higher shipping). Click to read more >>>