Tracy D. Terrell (1943–1991)

Dos Mundos: en Breve is a textbook designed for college-level Spanish classes that have fewer than 4 contact hours per week. Its 11 chapters covers verb tenses up through the future, imperfect and present subjunctive--quite adequate for a grasp of basic Spanish.

However, the textbook has, in my opinion, grave flaws, the major one being the level to which its pitched. This is not, in my opinion, a college level text but rather one suitable for high school. Altthough I felt the explanations of grammar adequate enough, my teeth were constantly on edge with the feeling of being "talked down to", making me wonder about the attention span and general educational level of today's American college student. The language radiates a false sense of enthusiasm about the subject. I found the tone nearly intolerable.

The text is organized in standard sorts of ways for a language textbook. There are three "steps" or "Pasos"that preceed the main grammar sections, covering greeting or introductions, gender, and even the present tense of -ar verbs in the third and last "Paso". the first chapter introduces -er and -ir verbs. There is no rational reason why dos Mundos should use the concept of "pasos"--there is nothing to distinguish them, really, from the main text.

Each Paso and chapter contains three main sections: activites meant to be carried out verbally in groups in the classroom; a cultural section contianing information about Hispanic activities and people both in Latin America and Spain and the US; and then a grammar section.

The text uses the standard device of a US college or university class, whose makeup is Politically Correct to the nth degree including a student in a wheelchair, to make it seem relevant and interesting to the average American college student. Gets it past the Though Police, I suppose. Thus, the readings and activities are focused on what an American college student of below-average intelligence and above-average naiveté might find interesting. The readings are banal and only occasionally useful. There are, in every chapter, brief writings from, theoretically, people in nearly every Hispanic country. I found them almost completely unrepresentative of those countries in today's Latin America. Reading them, you'd think that Venezuela, Costa Rica and other countries were just Spanish-speaking versions of middle-class USA, a major error.

Basically, however, you use a textbook to learn grammar and get a start on vocabulry. Dos Mundos does that well enough despite the maddening cutsiness of the main part of the text; the grammar sections, at least, are written for adults. The explanations are good.

The book comes with a CD that has various interactive exercises. They're not the best in the world, but work for practice, again. They're actually more informative and much more interesting, overall, than the text itself.

The vocabulary sections are quite good; you do learn a significant number of important Spanish words.

I used this book to prepare myself for a move to Panama; along with my knowledge of Portuguese, it served to get me to a primitive level of textbook Spanish. But one of the truly major problems any textbook, no matter how good, will face is the regional variations in useage of both grammar and vocabulary. There is no way around hands-on exprience for that; no one will ever become fluent from a textbook or class. But a textbook should at least prepare you for what you'll meet 'in the field'. Dos Mundos does so, but just barely and at the cost of making you wonder if the IQ of the average American college student studying Spanish has dropped 50 points over the past 25 years.… (mere)