Ven Conmigo!: Holt Spanish Level 1 review:1 stars (Horrible. Just horrible.) - I have no clue why my high school depends so much on these books. I show these textbooks to my family members (who happen to be from Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Spain) and we all just laughed at the sheer lunacy of these textbooks. We'd learn more Spanish in "America: The Book" than from the Holt books. The translations, dialogue, reviews, and examples were all trivial and laughably disorganized. How do they expect students to learn Spanish when 60% of the text is in English? There are much more efficient and easier ways to learn Spanish, the easiest language on Earth, than from an arbitrary slop of Holt publishing. I recommend Rosetta Stone, instead.2 stars (A decent Spanish textbook for average-slow paced learners.) - In my school they used this book for Spanish I. I found that although it was adequate, it went at a pretty slow pace. Throughout the entire book, as far as verbs go, it only teaches the present active verb conjugations, the simple concept of being going to do something, and at the very end, the present progressive, which translates to I am running (etc.).
One of the better parts of the book was the vocabulary. There were a good amount of nouns (although not as many verbs), and they were grouped somewhat coherently. 4 stars (I like this textbook series) - We used the Ven Conmigo series in my highschool Spanish I & II classes, and I found the textbooks very helpful. I guess the textbooks don't lay out every detail step by step--students need to take a certain amount of initiative for the learning process (like reviewing vocabulary on thier own time, participating in group work, and so on). These might not be the most appropriate textbooks for independent study though since a lot of the material is based on group activities, in class listening and videos, etc. Also, the guidance of a teacher (preferably a good one) goes a long way when attempting to create an excellent or great learning experience while using a good or even great textbook. Our highschool also used the parallel German series of these textbooks(I don't remember what it's called), and I also found those textbooks to be very easy to learn from. |
