Review: Good Beginning Spanish - But Probably Won't Use As Directed
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 26, 2012
Let me start with the positives.  The book is well-written and easy to use and, along with the companion website for audio pronunciation training, provides some good conversational Spanish for beginners that is primarily geared toward dining in restaurants.  I like the concept of practicing with other people and having different people read different parts of the conversations in the drills. This can be easily accomplished with Kindle if everyone has the book loaded on their own devices.I don't think I would use the book in the way that it is recommended because it would just be weird to be out in a restaurant having a scripted conversation in Spanish. The book also seems to assume that every waiter/waitress in a Mexican restaurant speaks Spanish. This is not always the case and in some parts of the U.S. it would not be unusual to go to a Mexican restaurant where few to none of the employees speak Spanish.This book is not going to make you fluent in Spanish, nor would it even be sufficient by itself for allowing you to be completely comfortable in a restaurant where the menu and conversation was exclusively in Spanish.  To me the title implies that the book might be a little more comprehensive in terms of restaurant Spanish than it actually is, and for this reason I gave it 3 stars.  Even so, I think that the author has done a good job of providing a very simple beginning Spanish book that makes the process of beginning to learn Spanish easy and even fun.