Opinion of Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish

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	• Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish: A Creative and Proven Approach Margarita Madrigal Main Street Books, 1989 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 80 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

great buy

great buy! I was referred to this book by a family friend. It arrived in perfect condition and on-time.

Very good

OK, it's not perfect. It is, however, a good book, better than most textbooks, and way, way ahead of Berlitz, for learning Spanish. Most Americans think they can learn a language in like 2-3 weeks. This is not so. It takes consistent practice to learn a language. This book supports that rather well. I'm sure the author is long gone, however, the book lives on. It is cited in The Next Whole Earth Catalog, by way, which is why I got my first copy of it.

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Nice book but send all of the pages.

I know the book well enough and it has a good reputation as a Spanish primer. However, the printer should take care of his work. The last copy I received was missing the first 16 pages and had to be sent back to Amazon.

Comprelo ahora!

What was refreshing about this book is the fact that the past tense is immediately introduced. Think about it, how many times do you tell people what you did a day ago, an hour ago, etc? The answer is - often.

In my high school Spanish class I took more than a decade ago, it was unfortunately anchored by slower/uninterested students. We never even got to the past tense. I was stuck in the present with no past and future!

Not anymore!

This book will make one the master of the preterite as well as the present. What I can understand and speak has multiplied tremendously. What I wish this book delved into a bit more is the subjunctive tense. It seemed merely touched upon. Also I really loved doing the exercises. When I was confused about a concept, the exercises would finally make things clear for me. The last two chapters have no exercises, it's only reading. I wish at least an exercise or two appeared in order to cement the rest of the concepts home.

Despite that, this book is wonderful for people like me who need to refresh their high school Spanish and would be great for beginners who wish to have a try at different verb tenses immediately.

My hint- DON'T SKIP ANY OF THE EXERCISES!

Make no mistake, you won't be fluent. But you will have a great Spanish foundation to build upon after finising this book. I ditto what others have said about also getting resources to go along with this book. I found the Michel Thomas Method to be an excellent accompaniment and found his explanations for the preterite as opposed to the imperfect are very similar. He will slam dunk the grammar into your brain without you realizing it!

Also I just started listening to Learning Spanish like Crazy based on recommendations. After doing the book and MT, I feel pretty advanced right now(I am just starting at the beginning so that may change as I progress). But for pronunciation practice it can't be beat!

Also Madrigal's book See it and Say it in Spanish is also a great little book you can use. Small enough to carry around everywhere!

A great improvement to this book would be audio! Publishers are you listening? Still a great learning tool without it. This book was published, I think in the 60's?? It still holds up to this day!

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Opinion of Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish

This is an excellent book. Its approach to teaching a language is unique in that it gives fourteen patterns of Spanish words relating to English words. Rather than learning one word at a time, I can learn 50 - 100 words. I don't even have to learn individual words. I just have to remember the pattern, e.g. words ending in "ity" in English usually end in "idad" in Spanish. I also have been able to apply some of these patterns to other Latin-based languages such as French and Italian. This has been a great help to me since I sometimes do research work in Europe. Thank you for making this book available to us at such a reasonable price.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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.

Original B & W illustrations.

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