First as a student of Spanish, and now as a Spanish teacher, at the secondary and college level, I have seen a lot of books about verbs. Like most beginning students, I bought 501 Spanish Verbs, and by the end of my first semester of college Spanish, I had already outgrown that limited book. In Spain, I found a fantastic book, Conjugación de los verbos: Manual Práctico (ISBN: 84-7640-891-9), but alas, the book is in Spanish, which limits its usefulness to beginning students.

All Spanish Verbs combines the usefulness of a 501 Spanish Verbs, with full verb conjugations, general rules of conjugation in the beginning, as well as tips on usual phrases, with the extended verb list of Conjugación.... What limits 501 Spanish Verbs is that there are 501 and only 501 verbs conjugated. In contrast, All Spanish Verbs provides models for the conjugation of every single paradigm you could encounter, and has an index with thousands upon thousands (I can't find my copy to give you the exact number) of verbs listed, with a reference to the fully conjugated verb that it conjugates like. For example, let's say you want to conjugate "mindanguear" (okay, not the most useful of verbs, but maybe you need to use it) and you look it up in 501... and the verb is not there. You're out of luck. With All Spanish Verbs... on the other hand, you see that mindanguear is not conjugated, but it is found in the index, and it is indexed to verb number 1--the model, basic -ar verb. You now know that this verb is conjugated perfectly regularly.

For the very early beginner, 501 Spanish Verbs might be a better choice, because it contains the 501 most frequent verbs you'll need to use, and for the first year of high school Spanish or the first semester of college Spanish, this might be sufficient. But if you have any language background and are comfortable with the idea of conjugating verbs, skip that book, and go straight to this one. Furthermore, if you think you will ever continue with Spanish, you will eventually need this kind of book.

Another advantage: since not as many verbs are conjugated fully, the book is nice and skinny, easy to stick in your briefcase or bookbag and carry everywhere with you!

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