This bilingual foreign language learning adventure consists of 46 chapters, in an illustrated mystery suitable for beginning to intermediate levels of Spanish, from about age 13 on through adults who are studying on their own. It comes with a follow-along CD to get your pronunciation up to speed, and the translation is line by line.

Well, I don’t much like being scared myself, but this sounds like I could handle it!

To find out more, click on the Chapter 19 link or on the image. Or it’s at Amazon, where it costs less but you may have to wait a while.

Want to Be Scared While Learning Spanish? is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

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:

Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

I sure have, and I was a little reassured one day when I was chatting with a very well-educated Mexican friend of mine. I used the wrong one of these two verbs. Conchita laughed and said, “Getting ser and estar right is one of the hardest things for foreigners. I even have an Italian friend who speaks near-perfect Spanish — except for those two verbs!”

Well, I do have a secret weapon to help me : Spanish Verbs: Ser and Estar : Key to Mastering the Language is a very useful little book.. It explains why the way these verbs are often taught is too general and not precisely accurate, and it gives you some easy-to-remember guidelines.

For example, the authors say, “The fundamental difference between ser and estar is the difference between WHATNESS and HOWNESS.”

I must say that no light bulbs went on in my brain when I read that the first time, but they go on to explain it quite well.

I was quite amused at some of their examples. These took me into subtle realms where I fear I have been messing up for years.

Here’s one example from the book:

Ser or Estar – and the Art of the Back-handed Compliment

As an example of the effective use of ser and estar, let us take the adjective inteligente (intelligent). Students are often taught that this adjective is one in that long list of exceptions which should only take ser, as for instance:

Ricardo es inteligente.

In fact, the word inteligente can also be used very effectively with estar. But when so used, the result can easily be an openly sarcastic remark or a nicely disguised insult. For by the very use of estar in this phrase we are explicitly limiting Ricardo’s intelligence to a particular accidental instance…

With this example, I will leave you. I won’t tell you about the example on page 59 that had me wondering how often I might have announced that I was a fallen woman. Without meaning to! (I’m not.)

To Be or To Be? In Spanish, That’s the Question is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

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.

Learn Spanish with a Kindle! is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

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!

For an enjoyable all-round introduction to Spanish, with aspects of Hispanic culture tossed in, it’s a good choice and it sells well at Amazon.

Here’s the book.

[2] Next, I came across a 3 CD set. (The book above comes with one CD.) Customer reviews were rather varied, but that’s pretty normal at Amazon! This looks like a good thing for a road trip, and at well under $20 it won’t break the bank.

I will spare you any more yellow and black art work. Here are the others that I found:

[3] Intermediate Spanish For Dummies

[4] Spanish Verbs For Dummies

[5] Spanish Phrases For Dummies

Even if you are not a dummy, these books are worth a look!

Spanish for Dummies 5 Ways is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

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).

I made the image large so you could read the contents. As usual, clicking on the image takes you to Amazon

[2] Here’s another vocabulary-builder, for the same price and also from Dover:

Being a former librarian, I did my obsessive bit to see if possibly these two books were different editions of the same thing but they do not seem to be.

Two Really Cheap Books to Help You Learn Spanish is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

You can tell if it is for you very simply…

Just read this short example, from a chapter called “Cranking Up Your Spanish,” where he gives us a couple dozen words and phrases we can use to start sentences. Does it make you want the book?

Así Que

Generally, this is the phrase you need to translate “so” at the start of a sentence. “So you wanna be a rock ‘n’ roll star?” would be expressed as ¿Así que quieres ser una estrella de rock? “So you’re really leaving me?” would be ¿Así que de verdad me vas a dejar? And so on. Note that así que does not, however, mean “So what?” For that, use ¿Y qué ?

This is typical of the many entries.

What’s so great about this book? Keenan’s writing combined with his knowledge! He writes as one who has been through all the agonies of starting to learn a language. Here is a bit from the introduction, which he admits a few pages later was more or less his own experience:

You’re on a bus, heading south. You’ve crossed the U.S. border and entered Latin America. English is behind you; a continent of Spanish lies ahead. Your pocket-size Spanish-English dictionary sits on your lap within easy reach. For practice, you look up the Spanish words for everything you see or think of: “bush,” “barbed wire,” “roadrunner,” “driver.”

You made yourself understood at the ticket counter and double-checked the bus’s destination with a matronly passenger, but you had some trouble telling the driver you wanted to keep your bag with you instead of sticking it in the vehicle’s luggage compartment.

You’ve held a brief conversation with the young man next to you, who asked your name, your travel plans, and (you think) your favorite major-league team. You sit back and close your eyes.

Already you’re a little tired. How many weeks or months of speaking like a small, semiliterate child can I stand? you wonder.

The chapters are written in sections, so you can learn a bit at a time. In fact, part of the reason Kelly and I haggled over who would keep the book was that we are both putting some of the expressions into our flashcard programs.

I could tell you about the chapter on ten ways to avoid being taken for a gringo, or the one called “the twilight zone” about the subjunctive, but I think I’ve made a pretty good case for this book. It’s at Amazon… click on the image to go there:

Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish: A Book I Wouldn’t Be Without is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Beginning and even intermediate level students of Spanish usually own a few bi-lingual dictionaries. I know, because I am an advanced intermediate student now and for the longest time I depended on my copy of The New World Spanish/English, English/Spanish Dictionary with its bizillion words.

Now I am living in Mexico and have a terrific teacher who has encouraged me to use a Spanish-Spanish dictionary as much as possible. She showed me several of her tomes which totally discouraged me with their small print and complicated definitions. Then with a smile on her face my teacher brought out two other dictionaries, both designed for students of Mexican Spanish. After glancing through them both, I knew I would go buy each of them. After several frustrating minutes I finally found both of them on Amazon, albeit not with the exact titles, which seem to have gotten lost in the translation!

Diccionario escolar mexicano by the publisher Trillas. The dictionary is divided into three parts: the dictionary itself which includes over 20,000 words with brief definitions and synonyms; Mexicanismos or terms specific to Mexico, many of them from Nahuatl or other Indian languages (but in current use); and a mini encyclopedia of the history, art, politics, literature and geography of Mexico.

This dictionary is geared to the upper primary school student in Mexico; however, this 736 page gem is a necessity for you if you are an intermediate beginner (and up) English speaking Spanish student. It is basic, written in easy to understand Spanish and will help you think of the vocabulary in Spanish. Often I find that I learn a new and important vocabulary word as I read the definition for the original word. I note the ones that seem particularly useful for me now. Since I live in Mexico I find the Mexicanismos helpful, especially when traveling since words used in different regions are defined. Tourists with some Spanish proficiency will find the encyclopedia very informative as they travel. It’s really convenient to read the brief entries about places of interest and the history associated with them.

Dime: Diccionario inicial del espanol de Mexico, also published by Trillas: this 632 page dictionary has a very interesting origin. Over 4,000 pages written by Mexican children were evaluated and from those pages linguists and teachers put together the dictionary which includes 13,000 currently used words with 22,000 definitions and an example of how to use each word. Finally a computer was used to analyze each entry for ease of understanding and use for Mexican students. This dictionary goes beyond the Diccionario escolar in that the definitions are more complete yet still written in basic Spanish. I find I want to know more about a word or see an example of how it is used. It is more spendy than the other dictionary but worth the cost for the intermediate beginner.

It wasn’t at Amazon.com when I checked but it was at Abebooks:  Dime: Diccionario inicial del espanol de Mexico

The more you depend on your Spanish as you study and read, the faster you will learn Spanish. At first using a unilingual dictionary will seem time consuming but if you stick with it, you will soon see the benefits. Vale la pena!

Using a Spanish – Spanish Dictionary is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.