Learning Spanish Verbs: Two Books That Can Come In Handy

I admit it, I love books… used to be a librarian, as I have mentioned before. I do not think you can learn Spanish just from books, but they do have their place for sure. And when you are learning Spanish verbs, a good reference book can come in very handy.
Several years ago, I got myself a copy of Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses, by Dorothy Devney Richmond.
It’s an oversized workbook, with lots of excellent exercises to do. Handily, the answers are in the back. I got through a good chunk of the book and might yet go back to it sometime. My copy is a little beaten up because it went to many parts of Mexico in our RV with us, and I studied it during that that.
I thought it was the only verb book I would ever need, and indeed it could be for most people. I do recommend it to anyone beyond the most basic level of learning Spanish.
But some people tend to get addicted to things, and in my case it’s books. (We won’t discuss chocolate just now.) Once we had settled into life by Lake Chapala, not far from Guadalajara, I realized I wanted to put some of the main verbs up on my refrigerator, in all their tenses and persons.

The book I chose for that task has 555 fully conjugated verbs, so I will never be done with it! The Big Red Book of Spanish Verbs with CD-ROM, Second Edition is a treasure trove of conjugations.
Mercifully, there is a list  that has the 50 most common verbs, so you can get some good ideas for where to start.
Several verbs did in fact end up on my refrigerator and from there they did (mostly) get transferred into my brain. I like that each page has a variety of examples of usage for each verb. This makes the book fall into the category of light reading at times, even though the book itself is quite large. I enjoy flipping through and reading bits, without much effort to memorize. For example, you can notice that the verbs calcular and organizar – along with many others — have the meanings you would expect from your knowledge of English.
The CD it comes with has hundreds of interactive exercises, sample conversations (which you can listen to with a computer or on an mp3 player), and more.
For a complete system to learn to speak Spanish fluently, have a look at this great program.
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