First Spanish Reader Dual Language Book
Are you looking for a powerful way to improve your knowledge of Spanish? If you are then try reading dual language books, where Spanish and English translations are side by side, on the book pages that face each other. Working on learning Spanish this way will turbo charge and really speed up the progress you make.
The reason this works so well is actually quite simple. When you start out learning to read in Spanish, you understand almost nothing of what you hear and read. Perhaps you recognize a word here and there, but for the most part, it's a string of unintelligible gibberish. When you listen to it spoken at conversation speed, there's no telling where one word ends and the next word begins. Then, as you get better at Spanish comprehension, you progress along to a point where you know all or almost all the Spanish words you read and hear.
The great thing about a dual language book like First Spanish Reader is it helps you with every step of this learning process. The basic process that's happening with the dual language and side by side reading is that without really thinking about it, you are leveraging some of what you already know very well, (the English language) in order to learn something you don't know as well yet. (the Spanish language)
As a beginner, you might have to spend most of your time reading the English side, occasionally looking over at the Spanish when you see a word or phrase that interests you, and you want to see how it's written in Spanish. So, at this point, you are seeing some of the Spanish side but you often need to look over for the definitions in order to grasp the meaning of the book.
Then, later, as you get better and better, you'll be able to read mostly on the Spanish side of the book. You'll be reading the Spanish and immediately comprehending as you go along. You'll be at a very rewarding point where you are grasping a larger and larger portion of Spanish on your own. And you'll be looking only once in a while over to the English for a definition of a certain word you might not have learned yet. The looking for definitions has become the exception instead of the rule at this stage of the game.
And all this time the reading you're doing is meaningful and enriching. - You'll read classical stories, poems, proverbs, traditions, etc. So, in addition to learning Spanish, you'll learn a lot of other interesting and useful information that makes your life better at the same time.
Another great benefit of this book is you are building up different parts of your Spanish language skills at the same time. In other words, you're learning to recognize how a word is spelled and how to use the word in an actual sentence at the same time you're learning the meaning of the word. The back of the book has extensive oral and written exercises for you to test your comprehension. There's also a list of Spanish vocabulary words used in all the stories along with their definitions. It's a great idea to give a try to adding this type of learning experience to whatever other methods for learning Spanish that you're currently using.