Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course Review

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(More customer reviews)Reading is not a bad way to learn a romance language like Spanish. You can start by reading this book. Then you can hammer down what you've learned and build your vocabulary by reading Spanish-language books. (Amazon has numerous dual-language Spanish/English books.) Then you can go to Mexico to get practice speaking and listening.
The authors give thoughtful advice about how to use this book. Included in that advice is the recomendation that you spend eighty to one-hundred twenty hours mastering its contents. This advice proved useful to me. I was growing frustrated at one point. Then I reviewed my log of hours spent learning, and I discovered I was going way too fast. So I slowed down, reviewed carefully, and then I proceeded at a more realistic pace.
One thing. On page 109 there are two columns labeled "Indirect object" and "Direct object". These labels are reversed. You'd be able to figure that out on your own, but now you don't have to. (You're welcome.)
As a companion to this text, I used "Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses." Sometimes I needed a different perpective to understand a particular grammatical point. These two books articulate well. One gives you thoughtful, sophisticated readings and invites you to translate them into English; the other gives you English passages and invites you to translate them into Spanish. Practice makes Perfect goes into more detail on what it covers, but Spanish for Reading covers all the fundamental parts of speach, not just verbs (although of course verbs are eighty to eighty-five percent of learing Spanish).
For your eighty-to-one-hundred-twenty hours you get all the fundamental parts of speach for Spanish, plus about two thousand vocabulary words. The book contains numerous useful and interesting exercises. With the aid of a dictionary, you will be able to read right away after learning this book. When you have built up your vocabulary, you can throw away the dictionary.

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A unique approach to Spanish reading comprehension, Spanish for Reading can be used as a textbook supplement in classrooms or by anybody who is teaching himself Spanish. It begins by demonstrating similarities between words and parts of words in Spanish and English, and proceeds to offer practical instruction that will help readers broaden recognition of words and phrases. Each of the book's fifteen chapters concludes with a reading passage, the first of them quite easy to comprehend, and successive passages increasingly complex and sophisticated. Early passages are simple essays on Spain's and the Spanish-speaking world's language, geography, and culture. Later passages are excerpts from well-known works by world renowned Spanish writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Students who use this volume methodically will ultimately be reading and understanding these passages in their original, unedited Spanish, without need to seek outside help. Short of spending time in Spain or Latin America, here is as good an introduction to Spanish culture as a student will be able to find anywhere. Photos and line drawings.

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