Picture Perfect Spanish: A Survival Guide to Speaking Spanish

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Summary: An effective system of using pictures to teach
Review: In Picture Perfect Spanish: A Survival Guide To Speaking Spanish, Jerry Lucas employs an effective system of using pictures to teach more than 600 words of Spanish in such a way as to insure correct pronunciation, along with basic sentence structure, grammar, conjugation. The reader will quickly pick up hundreds of common phrases enabling him or her to speak clear coherent Spanish. This completely "user friendly" and highly recommended manual is the equivalent of one year's beginning Spanish and will have the reader up and running with a working vocabulary and conversational skill far more quickly than the usual classroom approach to beginning Spanish. Picture Perfect Spanish is also the ideal "refresher" reference for those who have once studied Spanish but have forgotten most of what they learned over the intervening years.

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Summary: How To Memorize a Language Without Really Learning It
Review: Truly effective language learning requires thinking in the target language, not association with sounds and words of your original language. While the Lucas method of memorization may work well for students who want to score high marks on tests, true mastery of a language comes from knowing how its elements are built from the inside, not from constructing superficial outside details that have nothing to do with the language. For example, on page 113, to memorize the Spanish word "medico" (doctor), memorization of the phrase "May I doctor you from over here, Miss Dee, the cobra?" is supposed to help. But isn't it easier (and more helpful) to learn "medico" as a cognate of the English word "medical"? That way, the learner can extrapolate the meaning of other Spanish words similar to "medico" instead of memorizing an entirely different nonsense phrase. When you're in a Spanish airport, trying to catch your flight on time, is fumbling around with Miss Dee the cobra really going to help you?