Spanish - Light & Easy!, August 6, 2000

A light (and I really mean light - the book weighs about 2 ounces) and helpful book for anyone trying to build their Spanish vocabulary. Printed by the good people at Dover Publications, the book lacks the fancy designs, illustrations, and other graphics that books are generally well known for, however it is a very resourceful book to have around.

Author Seymour Resnick does a great job in compiling the 1,001 most used words in the Spanish language, however there is one negative thing about this book. There is not a pronunciation guide throughout the whole book. Although it's not a dictionary, it is always helpful to have this reference mentioned in a foreign-language book. Besides this fault, this book will make excellent reading material for anyone trying to brush up on their Spanish before a trip, meeting, or just to chat with a friend or relative.

$1.95?? Are you KIDDING me?, October 29, 2003

Okay, I thought that $1.95 was a misprint, and I bought it just to get a bargain. But omigod, talk about a bargain! At ten times the price, this book would be a bargain. It's not going to teach you to speak Spanish. It's not going to help you conjugate Spanish verbs. It's not going to make you fluent or able to read the newspaper in Zihuatenejo. But know what? It's going to make your next foray into a Spanish-speaking country a whole lot easier.
Overall, it's a dictionary, but there are subsections like food, colors, travel, clothing, and within those sections things are arranged alphabetically. Each word is used in a whole sentence (many of which are very handy sentences to have at your disposable) with translation, of course.
Anyway, stop reading this review and buy this book. Hell, at this price, buy 10 and give them to everyone in your family the next time you go south of the border.
Highest recommendation, and an utter steal at this price.

Good little vocabulary-builder for intermediate student, November 26, 2004

It's appropriate to judge a book's success based on how well it fulfills its intended goals. If I write a book on modern popular music, for example, I would not expect it to be disparaged if it insufficiently covers medieval architecture or Roman medical advances.

This analogy comes to mind when thinking about this book. At first, I was myself tempted to dismiss the book. On the negative side, each word has only one sentence, and there's no English-to-Spanish section. What good is that?

Other reviewers have taken this tack. A book with 1000 words isn't going to be useful if you know much more than 1000 words. And a book with no pronunciation guide is not going to be very useful for beginngers.

On the other hand, the clear purpose of this book is one that I feel it does quite well: it's for the intermediate student (like me) and shows you which words to concentrate on learning. In other words, it helps me build my working useful vocabulary. I have several dictionaries: the problem for me is to know which words out of the 80,000 to concentrate on learning and which to ignore.

In some cases, you can look at the English and take a guess: the word meaning "talk" is likely to be very useful and "disambiguate" less so. Again, though, it's that middle category I want to know about: the ones that are useful even though, not having made a serious study of word usage, they don't seem so to me. And that's where the book really shines. It's a handy list of those words.

Its small size is also a plus. I carry it around with me and look at it from time to time when I have a free second.

In summary, this is a good little book that will help the intermediate student build his working vocabulary. It's not perfect, but it's a decent little book to have around.

Its two dollars. Buy it., September 7, 2004

Everyone on the planet that doesn't speak Spanish should own this little book. For $2 it has suprisingly good information. No complaints from me.

Spanish On The Go, September 3, 2004

I like this book. It's probably the only Spanish book that I found
that's so small that I can put it in the back of my pocket and take
it everywhere I go. But you will need a good Spanish course to go
along with it. I am doing the Learning Spanish Like Crazy ( http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=217396 ) digital
course and the live teleseminars. Speaking one-on-one with the
Spanish instructor at the LSLC live teleseminars helps alot
pronouncing the words that I am learing in 1001 Most Useful Spanish
Words. You can also get a Spanish speaking friend to check your
pronounciation.

Great tool but lacks something , August 21, 2004

This book is a good tool. But what it lacks is a recording that will tell you how to pronounce the words. I found it more helpful when I combined it with the Learning Spanish Like Crazy ( http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=217396 ) CDs. The instructors at LSLC let me know which words from 1001 were actually used by Latin Americans and which ones were archaic.