Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish: A Creative and Proven Approach

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I really like the way Margarita started out teaching verbs in the past and future tenses rather than in the present tense. Most conversations are based on what you did or are going to do, not what you are doing at that exact moment. Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish is a great way to begin learning Spanish. The only thing that would make this book complete would be if it had some listening exercises to help students practice all four language skills. Despite this particular weak point, the book’s teaching method and “language shortcuts” are a creative and innovative way to learn the basics of Spanish. With these keys, you will start to understand what people are saying and be able to translate English thoughts into Spanish expressions.

First, let me assure you that you can learn Spanish on your own—and these days you have all the needed resources easily available. The book is divided into 24 subject themes including medical terms, business terms, clothing, food, and art and culture. A short-coming I noticed is that if one was learning Spanish afresh from this book, they would have little idea of how the words are pronounced as they read through. There is a pronunciation key at the beginning, but that can only help so much, and the “NOSE” rule, explaining which syllable to emphasise, isn’t explained until the last chapter. I guess this is generally a problem with text books, so I recommend listening to audio courses like Michel Thomas and Pimsleur concurrently, as well as DuoLingo and Memrise, from which you can hear the correct Spanish pronunciations and practice them yourself.

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I used to carry this book around with me everywhere. I would read lessons whenever I had free time, reading the sentences, and saying them out loud. It helped me get a solid foundation for Spanish early on, so I highly recommended this book if you’re new to Spanish. All the exercises focused on your written, pronunciation and reading skills. Since there’s no listening exercises, you’ll need to train these skills with other resources. As I was saying, I listen to a lot of Spanish radio. Over the last ten days, as I was reading Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, I noticed that I was hearing, daily, what I was reading about in the book. Today, as I listened, I noticed I was understanding more than I had ever understood. This book is practical.

In chapter 42, Madrigal also covers the Past Perfect Subjunctive which enable you to express the following in Spanish: I worked through the book thoroughly from cover to cover, completing most of it within one week, and it really brought everything together for me. Having some exposure of the vocabulary and grammar from DuoLingo and Memrise helped me cruise through it without much difficulty (at first, I was worried it was too basic for me!) I’m the kind of learner that needs to know the why behind the action/words and this book is amazing when it comes to that. Something kind of funny is that we refer to this book as the “Madrigal’s Miracles” book. Not sure how Madrigal’s Magic Key turned into that, but it did :).As I mentioned before, this Spanish textbook is written in English. But the Spanish vocabulary and examples are presented in standard Spanish that you can use in different countries. The motto of this book, if such there be, is "And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche" (Chaucer). From my own experience I know that what is not gladly learned is not learned at all. It is the essence of this method to make learning Spanish a pleasure for you. I have tried to guide you lovingly through the language. Every means of making it easy for you has been incorporated into this book. Thousands of questions that have been asked by former students have made it possible for me to anticipate your questions and to answer them. From the time man first began to learn foreign tongues down to the present time, language methods have relied on memory and not on the pupil's powers of creation. Now the process is reversed. This book will teach you to create. The very first lesson will prove to you that you can create at least one hundred times more material than you could possibly memorize in the same given time. Furthermore, the process of creation is exciting, whereas mechanical memorizing is tremendously boring. Also consider that you are apt to forget a word that you memorize mechanically. But a word that you create stays with you forever.