A thin, simple guide for tourists. Latin-American usage, but would mostly be understood in Spain. This has been an extremely useful guide for a family trip in Mexico. All the basics are here, 750 basic phrases in only 50 pages: pronunciation, greetings and introductions, travel by air, taxi and automobile, customs and baggage, hotel, restaurants and food lists, banks and money, shopping and services, health and medical concerns, and words for the weather, the days of the week and more. In particular, we found the travel, restaurant and automobile repair sections extremely helpful. (We were able to find a man to repair a flat tire in rural Mexico, very quickly and cheaply!) The brief sections of the book are easy to navigate, and a complete index makes finding a word or phrase quick and easy. I would definitely recommend this book for travellers with little or no Spanish. Used together with a pocket English-Spanish dictionary for additional words, this book will make foreign travel less stressful and more enjoyable. ( )

There are indeed useful phrases for the traveler, but the way they show how to pronounce things is pretty awful at parts and you'd sound really weird pronouncing some of this stuff... for example:
English: "I want to leave these packages for a while" =
Spanish: "Quiero dejar estos paquetes un rato."
Their way to pronounce this is: "KYAY-ro day-HAHR ESS-tohss pah-KAY-tess oon RRAH-toh"
I know how to pronounce things well after over a year of learning spanish...Even looking over the small pronunciation guide in Madrigal's Magic Key to spanish will help a lot more with pronunciation. That sentence is more like "KYEH-roh deh-HAR ESS-tohs pah-KEH-tess oon RRAH-toh"
Anyway, still there are a lot of useful phrases and people will still probably understand some things, even using the book alone. My spanish boyfriend does think some people actually do only rely on books like these for pronunciation because he says he's heard tourists from America speak similarly to this and that it sounds weird. Even though it's obviously best to read a pronunciation guide AND hearing things being said, if you are only reading how to do it, the book could be a lot more helpful and improved. ( )