Pure nostalgia!
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Littlewood's Living Spanish first came out in 1949 and the book hasn't changed since. I can well remember our teacher taking great delight in shouting "Right, Spanish! Get your Littlewood's out!" The reading passages are of pre-EU Spain, Franco's old rural Spain, and wonderfully entertaining!
As far as actually learning Spanish goes, the approach is Grammar Translation based, which has been accepted as the most tedious and inefficient way of learning any foreign language. It does not follow the Communicative Approach, as the more modern communicative-based course-books available here do.
As the title indicates, language is a living thing, and best learned by using it, not by studying the grammar. Content-based or task-based learners tend to develop fluency, while learners who focus on form tend to develop lower fluency.
Languages are learned thus: Listening-> Speaking-> Reading -> Writing so use this book once your aural and oral Spanish is at Pre-Intermediate or Intermediate level and it'll really make sense and can't be beaten for the vintage entertainment value!
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comprehensive and interestingly old fashioned
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It would be a struggle to pick up spanish from this book alone, as it is very compact and moves very quickly through the various topics, but as a complement it serves well, especially as it does cover such a broad spectrum of material, works very well as a review or refresher course.
The age of the material is fairly vintage, as can be seen in the representation of a Spain, which is increasingly hard to find. the old-fashioned nature can actually be quite entertaining.
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These books have been around for decades
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This series of books have been around for a long time. The first one I ever bough was the Italian book in the late 60's. So they are still here and still selling steadily. There's nothing gimmicky about these, they're just solid langauge books that will help you learn the language from the basics up. I first used one on a trip over many months in Italy and it fitted perfectly with being there and needing something to develop my langauge skills whilst in the environment. In the long term I'm sure you might need more grammar, more verbs, more words, more of everything - but this will get you going on a solid foundation of understanding the language from the ground up (something you can't do with a phrase book or just adio CDs). This would fit perfectly with Michel Thomas's CD courses to help you fill out the grammar and construction beyond his practised phrases and dialogue.
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