Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Irregular Verbs Up Close (Practice Makes Perfect Series)

I have been very happy with the Practice Makes Perfect series in Spanish. The Turbo-verb approach here makes good sense, especially for an aging memory with "crosstalk" from Italian and French verb forms. The breakdown of regular and irregular verb "misbehaviors" is just what I needed to tame the subject.The layout of the exercises is especially good. So far I am able to do each item in the exercises as a Kindle "note". Then, with my Spanish dictionary as the base dictionary, I am able to check my verb form answers by seeing if the dictionary recognized them. Pretty neat. (Currently Kindle notes are not easily edited as text, so I could not correct the errors on the spot.)The book, like most in the series, is easy to read and use on the Kindle. (The same is not true of the author's  Practice Makes Perfect: The Spanish Subjunctive Up Close , where the exercises are block images that do not respond to the "zoom" command at all. You can READ  Practice Makes Perfect: The Spanish Subjunctive Up Close  on the Kindle, but when you come to the exercises in that book, you will have to switch to a PC Kindle app or, at least, to the iPad Kindle app plus pencil and paper.)I have both this and the Dorothy Richmond book  Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses, Second Edition . The Richmond book is a more general book with lots of exercises for someone with a few months of Spanish study so it makes sense to have both of them.This book and the others in the series have enhanced my reading and understanding of Spanish with each chapter. (Of course, if you want to actually speak the language, you have to practice that with other people.) But now that the grammar books and the dictionary have made my reading easier, I will have to drag myself away from the Spanish version of  El Juego del angel (Spanish Edition)  to do my grammar homework...Recommended without reservation.

I used this book after using "Spanish Verb Tenses" by the same Practice Makes Perfect authors. This book was helpful in giving me so much practice seeing oddly-misshapen irregular verbs. You built patterns, and would go "I think this is the answer, but it's so ugly" and either you were right, that word does exist in Spanish and you are meeting it for the first time (correctly predicting it too!), or on occasion you were wrong, and came face-to-face with another forgotten grammar rule (like anduve being the past pretérito for andar, instead of andé)This book is a little on the small side, and it isn't strong on giving a lot of translated sentences. I'd work with the thicker, meatier "Spanish Verb Tenses", which also has a lot of irregular verb exercises, and then using this as a follow-up to really fine tune your irregular verbs.It was a quick book, 12 chapters in total, often just 2 exercises of 20 sentences each. It took 6-7 hours of dedicated study to complete, which is worth the less than $14 for all the material on irregular verbs, but it isn't as much bang-for-your-buck as other titles in this series of books. It's rather too lightweight, but any book that helps my irregular verbs get straightened out for the price of one hour of tutoring is worth it still to me. More of a supplement than the main-course, but a satisfying addition that helps you predict irregularities with more accuracy.

After having worked through this book completely, I can recommend it highly. The system Vogt presents for learning verb forms is logical and concise, although it takes some mental exertion to wrap your mind around the concepts. But once you get them, it makes using some verbs more automatic.Vogt presents four microsystems, with only six forms of each verb to memorize. From these you can extrapolate the rest of the forms. He says, "Attempting to derive the form you need by beginning from an infinitive causes most of your problems and frustrations with Spanish verbs....Knowing only the infinitive tells you nothing about whether or not the verb is irregular, or how and in which tenses and moods it is irregular."I have only three recommendations/gripes for the whole book.1) If he publishes another edition, I would hope for more writing exercises for each chapter. For people who need lots of practice like me, I recommend also working through the book "Spanish Verb Tenses" by Dorothy Richmond.2) I wish I had worked through Vogt's book "Spanish Past-Tense Verbs Up Close" before I studied this book. Since the preterit tense has the most irregularities, I needed to get them firmly in mind before tackling others that hang on them.3) In the chapter detailing the preterit indicative, under single-vowel stem irregulars, he omits any discussion of i --> y verbs like caer, creer, leer, poseer, huir, incluir, etc.Oh yes, and one minor typo: In the chapter detailing the future, on page 38, the first sentence in the second paragraph should be struck out. It was obviously copied from a previous chapter and does not apply to this section.

The turbo system approach doesn't appeal to me. I just found it introduced more complications to what is already a difficult topic and this is the first of the Practice Makes Perfect books I put away and didn't bother with.

Very useful

I've always struggled with irregular verbs, but so far this book has been very helpful.

More than I wanted or expected.

Plenty of exercises for review of irregular verbs in all verb tenses. Helps to reinforce grammar skills while studying the language.