Puntos de partida: An Invitation to Spanish (Student Edition)

There are better ways to learn Spanish than this book, but this is the one that has a monopoly at the schools. Textbooks are beginning to disappear for advanced courses in foreign languages. I have versions 5 and 8 of McGraw and Hill's "Puntos de partida" in my personal library and I fail to see any real significant changes in the text. ( Language is language). Perhaps I am old school but I like to have hard copy of what I have studied. More colleges are moving to e-books for the same price of the textbook and when you are through with the course you have nothing but your notes. I use to think all my brains were in my university text books, but they are not, however I do refer to my old textbooks years after I took the course. Thankgoodness for Amazon for they have become both the buyer and seller of new and used college and university textbooks plus many free e-books. Even two years after my Spanish class I am still using my hardcopy of the textbook. It is so nice to go off some place strange and study with a book.

This was the required textbook for my college Spanish classes. What can I say, it got the job done! It's well written and not difficult to navigate the lessons in a class. On its own, I wouldn't recommend it for independent study, though, it's catered more to classroom settings.

I am a native Chinese speaker who have been living in States over 11 year. I understand how hard it is to pick up a second language. The personal reason that I gave this book a five-start is mainly because it come with a very wealthy online resource which including Textbook audio, Textbook answer key,grammar tutorials, and interactive verb charts. Being a auditory learner, having these online textbook audio is very important to me. Because this is a well organized book that come with all these online materials, I saved myself some $ by no longer need to take Spanish class at the local community college,plus the time for driving and the expense for gas. thank you. :)

I would recommend this book for people who are enrolled in a Spanish class.However, if you are not in a class the book would be very hard to follow. It leaves a lot of room for instructors to put in the information they want you to learn that goes along with what the book is teaching you. It would be very difficult to learn just from the book. I love the book and will be using it for my next 2 Spanish classes.

I am currently using this book for my Spanish 1 and 2 class and it is a help especially the dictionary in the back! I would def recommend getting the lab manual and the workbook with it though because if you are new to the spanish language it can be very difficult to keep up and practice makes all the difference. The book alone is great however the price is a little ridiculous! Especially since spanish varies in every country so some parts of the book are inconsistant with what we are taught and also their are words spelt incorrectly throughout the book. My professor is constantly correcting it.

My instructor recommends this book. As a retired teacher I like the layout

The copied book the bookstore sells for twice as much is not as good! Highlighted text does not show up and they don't even give you a binder to put it in! There is also a Spanish/English and English/Spanish glossary in the back of this version! Save some money, buy this one!

I wonder how can you buy this kind of book to peopleshameful describe and explain shape of book for people