Rating: - Good verb book, but NOT the best
This is a very good book on spanish verbs, but not the best available. For a comparison, check out my review of a truly superb spanish verb book: Alfredo Gonzalez Hermoso's book, The Spanish Verb Manual.

 

Rating: - It is a complementary.
It is a complementary book to most of the spanish dictionaries, which don't mention the exact verb patterns.

 

Rating: - A Must-Have For Anyone Learning Spanish Verb Tenses
What can I say but that this book is everything that it should be. For the serious learner, a must-have!

 

Rating: - The best of the three I've seen
This book, The Big Red Book of Spanish Verbs, and 501 Spanish Verbs are the three "big guns" out there on Spanish verb conjugations, and I think it's actually the best of the three, although I don't like the page layout as much.

All three of these books have their pros and cons, but this book has one major advantage over the other two--it not only has the verb tables--but in addition there is a detailed, 100-page grammar and usage section in the second part of the book where 75 important verbs are explained and used in more detail. Each of the 75 verbs gets an extra page or two, which makes it much more thorough than either The Big Red book or 501 Spanish Verbs in this regard.

This section includes separate discussions on all the tenses, such as the present, future, conditional, and subjunctive. In addition, there are several more useful features the other two books don't have, such as a discussion on the sequence of tenses, a summary of the subjunctive, uses of Ser and Estar, verbs that change meaning in the reflexive form, idiomatic expressions with some common verbs (which the 501 book does have), the "personal a," definitions of common grammatical terms, and regional differences in the use of verbs.

For example, there is the infamous verb coger, which means to take or to catch in most countries, but which in Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay, means to have carnal knowledge of equivalent to a certain four-letter word. In those countries, the verbs agarrar or tomar are used instead. So in other words, you wouldn't want to get confused in those countries and use the verb coger in regard to someone's sister. :-)

Another nice featurethe author includes practice sentences in which you change the subject or one of the other words so you have to conjugate the verb differently and then reply. I've found that this is more useful than just looking at the verb conjugation tables and trying to memorize them. For some reason, placing them in the context of a real sentence reinforces them even more. Learning a foreign language is a process of many little steps, and often it's two steps forward and one step back, and every little bit helps.

The Big Red and 501 Verbs books only have a few examples of how the verbs are used in sentences at the bottom of each page. The Big Red book has more of these than the 501 book, but it's still not nearly as extensive as the present one's.

One feature the 501 Verbs book has is a good section on the idiomatic usages of verbs. Another nice feature is it includes dozens of sample conversations at the back of the book on various topics, using the well-known Berlitz method (invented in the late 19th century by Maximilian Berlitz as an improvement on the classical rote memorization method of teaching languages) of simulated conversations in various practical situations, which the The Big Red and this one don't have.

One final minor feature, but one I still liked, was that each verb page in the 501 book has the progressive tenses using the verb estar at the bottom of the verb tables, which the other two don't have. This never changes once you understand the pattern, but it's still nice to have it laid out.

So all three books have their pros and cons, but if I had to have one verb book, it would have to be this one because of the much more extensive treatment of the 65 important verbs.

 

Rating: - A good book to have instead of or with 501 Spanish Verbs
I'd have given this book 5 stars if I didn't already have 501 Spanish Verbs and have a good knowledge of Spanish already. The layout is very good with two exceptions: 501 Spanish Verbs describes the differences in how, when, and why to use the different tenses first and displays the tenses in an easy to read table. This book describes the different tenses after the verb tables and the layout of the verb tables is not as nice as 501 Spanish Verbs. If, like 501 Spanish Verbs, it had the description of the tenses first, it would be a five star book. On the plus side, if you don't have 501 Spanish Verbs already and are a beginner in learning Spanish, this is a better book. The lessons are very good for beginners and the flash cards, which have to be cut although it's not really necessary, are good for testing your knowledge. If you don't already have 501 Spanish verbs and are just starting to learn the verbs, this is a better book for you than 501 Spanish verbs. (Having both can't hurt especially for the price.)

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