Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have over 20 years experience as a college teacher of Spanish and as a federally certified Spanish court interpreter and, in my opinion, this volume is without equal among Spanish grammars. What you find here is not available anywhere else: an empirical, scholarly presentation of Spanish as it is spoken throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This is not an intermediate grammar as some reviewers have asserted. It is not a repetition of conventional grammar rules as they have been handed down for generations. There are much simpler books that explain the use of the subjunctive, the mechanics of noun-adjective agreement, verb conjugation etc. Rather, this book describes how literate people in different countries (or regions of countries) use the language in real life. It tells you to what extent they respect the traditional academic rules of grammar, and to what extent they break them and change them. In other words, it tells you what the living rules of the language are in distinct places. All of this is supported by copious citations from the writings of novelists, scholars, journalists, etc. making it an eminently readable book. It's very easy to pick it up to search for the answer to a specific question and end up reading for an hour because it contains so much fascinating information. In short, it is a superb and eminently useful piece of scholarship, which belongs on the shelf of any serious student of the language.