Speaking Spanish Like a Native

by Brad Kim

Speaking Spanish Like a Native makes eye contact with the reader. This book will awaken the student to a more lively way of learning while spicing up their Spanish speaking ability. Written in an entertaining and colorful style, Speaking Spanish Like a Native pulls you out of the classroom and places you into the huddle with native Spanish speakers—giving you the inside scoop on words, phrases, and expressions you cannot get from textbooks. While many books merely inform, this one also teaches, and it leads by example—practical and engaging examples that show the student how to speak in the context of real conversations with native speakers.

193 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2005

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would love to be able to review this book and state that it was instrumentally helpful in improving my conversational Spanish, but I can't do that, primarily because of the structure of the book.

The content is oddly organized, alphabetized by English meaning and not cross-referenced in Spanish anywhere. I read a colloquialism in a magazine a day after finishing the book, remembered having seen it, and was not able by the index, table of contents, or otherwise to locate the Spanish phrase in the book-- I would have already had to have known the English, and therefore not needed the book.

It's unclear how the author intended the reader to assimilate the information. The contact-paper binding and strange editing point to the book being self- or small-house published; it really could have benefited from editorial expertise and having someone knowledgeable in language instruction publication to help re-work the material into something usable.

There are many, many phrases, sayings, colorful expressions, and so forth presented here, but only in quippy paragraphy form introduced by the English equivalent. I will keep this book for a while hoping to find a way to use it, but for being able to comprehend what a Spanish speaker or writer is saying, this is not the resource.

[Eden · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the authors of this book are obviously a jovial sort, their book is organized in a way that makes it nearly impossible to utilize the language unless you are already passably fluent in the language and it's various forms of conjugation. It's listed alphabetically by PHRASE, with any verb in the imperative for (to be, to do, to walk, etc.), and a small paragraph explaining all the kooky ways you can use the word. What this means is that you have to intuitively know how the authors think of a phrase in their vernacular, AND the appropriate conjugation. Additionally, they use other slang words in their examples, which doesn't help to define anything other than their familiarity with the spoken form.

And finally, it is geared almost entirely for Mexican spanish slang, which really limits the use of the book for me, since I go to places other than Mexico as well. Since, for example, in Costa Rica the Usted tense is used almost exclusively, but the book assumes that if you're so informal as to use slang, it must be in the Tu tense, then you literally can't use the book in an entire country.

On the other hand, there is a short chapter on groserías, which finally allowed me to conjugate the various forms of "f-you".

[Scot León Pfuntner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good source of idioms- although some of my friends from Mexico didn't recognize some of the sayings, or suggested some modifications to what i said.