Spanish Voices is a two-part series designed to provide learners with an opportunity to hear and study authentic Spanish as it is spoken by native speakers from around Latin America and Spain. Unlike the scripted materials read by voice actors used in many course books, Spanish Voices offers dozens of audio essays spoken naturally and off-the-cuff. The materials in the books are designed to help you improve your listening skills and expand your vocabulary in Spanish. Bonus: The MP3s can be downloaded for free from our website, where you can also find interactive flashcards, quizzes, and games, as well as links to further listening and reading practice on the topics presented in the segments (audio essay chapters). Each segment consists of: 1) True or False and Multiple Choice exercises to sharpen your listening skills and increase how much you can understand, whatever your level. 2) Vocabulary and Translation exercises to help you expand your vocabulary and improve your understanding of Spanish collocations and grammar. 3) In-chapter answers to the exercises (no having to flip back and forth to the back of the book). 4) Verbatim transcripts of the audio with side-by-side English translations. 5) Lined sections for note-taking and recording new vocabulary.

Spanish Voices is a two-part series designed to provide learners with an opportunity to hear and study authentic Spanish as it is spoken by native speakers from around Latin America and Spain. Unlike the scripted materials read by voice actors used in many course books, Spanish Voices offers dozens of audio essays spoken naturally and off-the-cuff. The materials in the books are designed to help you improve your listening skills and expand your vocabulary in Spanish. Bonus: The MP3s can be downloaded for free from our website, where you can also find interactive flashcards, quizzes, and games, as well as links to further listening and reading practice on the topics presented in the segments (audio essay chapters). Each segment consists of: 1) True or False and Multiple Choice exercises to sharpen your listening skills and increase how much you can understand, whatever your level. 2) Vocabulary and Translation exercises to help you expand your vocabulary and improve your understanding of Spanish collocations and grammar. 3) In-chapter answers to the exercises (no having to flip back and forth to the back of the book). 4) Verbatim transcripts of the audio with side-by-side English translations. 5) Lined sections for note-taking and recording new vocabulary.

Conquistador Voices, a two-volume work by Kevin H. Siepel, is intended for the general reader. The book presents the history of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas principally through the voices of those who participated in that signal event. Its goal is to make this story engaging by substantial use of first-person narrative--much of it newly translated from Spanish and Italian sources.The overall story is told in five parts, each part featuring a principal Conquest actor--an explorer or conquistador. Volume I is devoted to the four voyages of Christopher Columbus, and to the subsequent conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes.Volume I opens with a scene-setting narrative and introduction to Columbus, a man with an unshakable belief in an idea and a dogged determination to carry out that idea. Columbus's landing and initial encounter with the peoples of the Americas is covered, as is his worsening relationship with the colonists, his arrest and removal to Spain, his rehabilitation, and his subsequent year-long, mutiny-ridden isolation on a Jamaican beach. Equally well covered are the many aspects of his complex personality.The second part of volume I covers the conquest of Mexico and the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes. We are taken on the early exploratory voyages to the Mexican coast, eventually to land there with Cortes and his not-totally-loyal troops. We see Cortes take charge of his men, gather initially-hostile Indian warriors to his cause, and move this large force inexorably toward the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. We witness Cortes's bold seizure of the Aztec king Montezuma, the Spaniards' flight from the capital on the noche triste, Cortes's determination to hold this land against attacking Spaniards, and his final razing of the city with the slaughter of most of its inhabitants.An effort has been made throughout Conquistador Voices to avoid moralizing on these events, but to report them--with all due filtering of wheat from chaff--as we have been told that they occurred. Nine maps accompany the text, along with index, copious footnotes, and brief bibliography.

She discusses the factors that provoked the war and how they affected Spanish women - both the "visible" women who during the turbulent 1920s and 1930s tried to become part of mainstream politics and the "invisible" women who came to the fore during the revolutionary years of the Second Spanish Republic from 1931 to 1936 and became activists in the protest against the military insurrection of 1936.

Use the English you already know to quickly learn the basics of Spanish with this unique, accessible guide featuring original illustrations by Andy Warhol—from one of America’s most prominent language teachers. Read, write, and speak Spanish in only a few short weeks! Even the most reluctant learner will be astonished at the ease and effectiveness of Margarita Madrigal’s unique method of teaching a foreign language. Completely eliminating rote memorization and painfully boring drills, Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish is guaranteed to help you: • Learn to speak, read, and write Spanish quickly and easily • Convert English into Spanish in an instant • Start forming sentences after the very first lesson • Identify thousands of Spanish words within a few weeks of study • Travel to Spanish-speaking countries with confidence and comfort • Develop perfect pronunciation, thanks to a handy pronunciation key With original black-and-white illustration by Andy Warhol, Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish will provide readers with a solid foundation upon which to build their language skills.

The reflexive constructions that are the focus of this book are the constructions broadly described with the term “middle”: i.e., those that can appear in all persons, and in which the reflexive marker (RM) cannot be understood as a full referential pronoun. One goal of this study is to provide a corpus-based typology of middle and related uses that allow us to compare the behaviour of the RM in these constructions with previous typological accounts, where competing models (based either on changes of diathesis or on the semantics of the verbal event) can be found. A second goal is to shed light on the evolution of the different functions of the RM, by exploring the factors that affect its productivity, with a specific focus on those verbs where reflexive marking is most variable, that is, anticausative verbs and verbs with no change of valency. These reflexive constructions show a notable difference in productivity in Spanish and Galician, although the languages are closely related and contiguous. The languages are thus good candidates for a contrastive and variationist analysis serving these two goals. The semantic class of the predicate, its aspectual properties and the animacy of the subject are some of the most relevant factors that are taken into account to understand the motivations behind the presence (or absence) of the RM. By relying on a corpus of interviews from rural communities across peninsular Spain (except Catalonia), space as a relevant extra-linguistic variable is taken into account, helping uncover previously unknown geographical patterns.