GET IT USED!!!
BUY IT USED!!!!! The bind-in passcode is worthless because they publishers have already made that material FREE on their website!!! ... I thought I needed it for school, but it turns out that my school has a specialized workbook on their own website, which I had to pay for separately anyway. Great text, just not worth full price.
WHAT a ridiculously organized textbook!
The organization of this text is incredibly unhelpful to the introductory Spanish student. Conjugated verb forms, reflexive pronouns, and general vocabulary words are very often used long before the text actually _defines_ or _explains_ the words. Keep in mind that most American students now have little to no training in grammatical structure, so they will not be able to deduce the meaning of a word based on its location in a sentence.
Page design is similarly horrible--the "blue pages" at the end of each chapter are crammed full of text with very little white space or other categorizing strategy. Critical information is shoved off to the margins or relegated to footnotes.
My teacher did the best she could with the text, but she also relied heavily on the instructor's manual-- and the manual took the class all over the textbook in no particular chronological order. I felt badly for her because of the amount of explanation she had to do in order to pull the text together into any kind of coherency.
If you're a teacher pondering adoption of this text, run, RUN in the opposite direction! Let's hope the current edition is much improved. Exponentially much improved.
A reasonable book but the online resources it boasts about really suck
The book is OK, but don't count on finding any of the online stuff that the book boasts about on the back cover. I have looked everywhere trying to find it, but to no avail. I think they discontinued all the premium content or something. The website it gives to enter your registration code doesn't have a place to register. I recently emailed McGraw Hill tech support to ask what happened to the online content, but I am still waiting for a response.
(3 reviews)
