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Calling this book 501 Spanish Verbs is a little misleading.  Oh, it has 501 Spanish verbs, all right.  And then some.   An additional 2100 verbs, actually.  So maybe it should be called Barron’s 2601 Spanish Verbs.  Okay, I guess not.

It gets the title from its main section, which is listed as “Alphabetical Listing of 501 Spanish Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses and Moods”.  Sounds pretty dry, hunh?   Don’t let it scare you — this is a Great book.  It’s not an accident that this is in its 6th printing and is probably the best selling verb book of all time.  (That sounds kind of funny… best selling VERB book of all time. Ha)

But seriously folks…. a great book for one of the most difficult aspects of learning Spanish - the verb.  Unless you’re happy with “Me want food”, you’re going to have to learn to conjugate verbs.  This book helps.  A lot.

For one thing, it’s   marvelously organized and has a wide variety of helpful tools.  Unlike a lot of dictionaries, 501 is printed in two colors, so that the word you’re looking for will be in blue, and the rest is in black.  Such a simple thing makes a huge difference in how fast you can find something.  The page edges have tinted tabs. That helps too.

The 501 verbs begin on page 97 (the book has 730 pages) and are listed alphabetically by infinitive. There are listing for 55 Essential verbs, definitions of best grammatical terms, verbs with prepositions, Defective and Impersonal Verbs, AND a CD-ROM that has verb drills, exercises and tests.  This book is IT for studying verbs.  If you take Spanish classes, either at home or abroad, you’ll see a large number of people carrying this hefty volume.

The best way to use it is to first read the introduction and the table of contents to familiarize yourself with what’s included.  Then scan through the book and have a look.  There’s so much stuff that it would be easy to use it for years and never know that there was a certain topic covered (sample ENGLISH verb conjugations, for example).  Studying Spanish?   Put this on your list of Essential resources.  Enjoy.

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