Excerpt from Grammar of the Modern Spanish Language: As Now Written and Spoken in the Capital of Spain It has seemed to the writer of this volume that a systematic presentation of the laws that govern the official Castilian language, at the present stage of its development, and fresh from its native atmosphere, would need no apology. Whether in public or private instruction, nothing can adequately substitute the thorough acquisition of the forms and inflections of a language, and these are best comprehended and retained by the tabular arrangement, which at the same time furnishes an accessible base of supplies for reviews or reference. Spanish is not usually the first foreign tongue the student meets, and therefore the experience he has gained in Greek and Latin, or in French and German, may be turned to profit in saving much irksome routine indispensable to his earlier studies. He does not need, for example, to be taught the rules of agreement, to which general grammar has already accustomed his mind, but what he wants above all to know is, the forms of the article, the pluralization of words, the variation of adjectives, and the conjugation of verbs. This done, he can proceed to read any ordinary prose, leaving the syntactical peculiarities to be noted by experience, until a second and more critical rehearsal puts him in possession of all the facts of the language. Therefore, a grammar that will facilitate this end, giving him, at a small outlay of time, the requisite preliminaries to reading and writing, while furnishing ample means for more thorough subsequent studies, would seem to be the one most urgently called for. At least this is the case in our colleges, wherein the use of the so-called speaking-methods is impracticable by reason of the diffusion of grammatical material. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.