Short Stories in Spanish for Beginners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn Spanish the fun way! (Foreign Language Graded Reader Series)

This is a fantastic book for Spanish learners. It's not meant for absolute beginners, but it's more suited for an A2 level, as it contains many sentences in the past tense. I was very ambitious to read this book as a complete beginner and gave up hundreds of times until I finally learned how to read in a foreign language. If you start reading a book in your target language and find it challenging, it's better to aim to read a small portion each day, like one paragraph. Write down a few words or phrases with their translations in a notebook, then read them aloud before continuing with the book. For instance, here are some from page 3: - *Vena aquí* – Come here! - *Desde la puerta* – From the door - *¿Qué quieres?* – What do you want? - *¿Lo sabes?* – Do you know it? - *Estoy preparando* – I am preparing - *Estamos aprendiendo* – We are learning By using this method, you'll begin to enjoy reading books in any foreign language. Enjoy reading this book!

I bought this as I'm an adult learning Spanish and needed a fun way to pick up vocab as lists are quite boring. This book does that. It also helps me see how "lo" is used, which now makes alot more sense than when was learning it in class. Same for reflexive verbs. Some people who've read this book have said the stories are bland - I'll be frank: the stories are not designed to be gripping Latin dramas - let's get real here, this is a book to help you learn a language. I am grateful to have simple short digestible basic plots because it means I can understand it and learn some new words along the way. I appreciate the fact the author's instructions are that we are not supposed to be derailed if we don't fully understand the whole story, but to celebrate what you did know and to carry on. It's great. After each chapter there are some quick comprehension questions which I think are super useful.

I’ve completed a beginner’s year in Spanish and want to keep progress up during the summer break. This book really helps. The stories are short, simple and amusing. I struggled at first because I wasn’t used to reading Spanish text but I’m on chapter 4 now and seem to be understanding the flow much better even though I can’t yet conjugate verbs beyond the indicative tense. Lots of useful phrases. I’m glad I bought this and am ploughing through.

Interesting little stories that help with my Spanish reading

I bought this book as I had been teaching myself Spanish for the last 7 weeks. Ya se mucho espanol. nesitito leer los Libros de me ayundo. Although this is early days, Estoy aprendiendo rapidemente. My aim is to speak fluent en diez mes. This book is really helping me and I have only read the first 30 pages. I have now bought two further books from Olly Richards as I am so impressed

Superb book! I've been studying Spanish for over a year, and I felt like I was lacking the use of it. These short stories are super convenient and easy to read, and I'm retelling myself these stories after reading them, to improve my grasp of language. And I've introduced this book to my teacher, and we are now discussing these stories during our lessons :) Can't recommend enough!

Have the book but not getting enough time to read so I invested in the audiobook as well. Now i play this whilst in bed until I fall asleep. Nomidea if working yet but the speed of the speech is good as I actually get time to hear the words

But I haven't bought it for the thrill ;) It's meant for higher beginners - I'd say it could be a bit more challenging or maybe I know Spanish better than I think? There are only 2 - 3 words on each site I don't know, sometimes even none; I guess I will get the one for intermediate students; nevertheless the book is well prepared to help you expand vocabulary and teach how Spanish works in practice and that's the most important thing for that particular position; I feel compelled to take 1 star away for the stories - they're really not good and that makes it a bit of a struggle to read the book.

Parfait pour débuter

Mon fils de 12 ans adore cette série. Je lui ai acheté le meme en anglais pour les debutants et intermédiaires. Cela lui a permis de progresser tranquillement son vocabulaire en lisant des histoires drôles

Great book to really push yourself as a beginner. Laid out really well, and the author describes how best to learn from the book. Love the vocabulary section at the end of each chapter. Next I'll be grabbing the Mexican one from the same author.

I have been studying Spanish and this booked helped a lot. It took me twice to read each chapter while looking at words I didn't know yet, it is a good break from the usual grammar lessons. Highly recommended.

(Written by the wife!) First, I took my hubby's account--he's not into Spanish so much, but I am! As a life-long lover of the language (I took classes in high school and college), I picked up this book because, while I love the language, I've only recently begun to take learning it seriously. The Good: This book gives you realistic (semi-interesting) stories that focus on basic words and phrases. This was great because I was able to ACTUALLY understand around 85-90% of the story. It really sucks when you spend more time translating than reading :-(. The Great thing about this book is the intro on HOW TO READ this book effectively--please don't skip that! The focus is more on finishing the short chapters than knowing every word: believe me, using this method you will look up fewer words, and feel more accomplished as a reader. It really is the best strategy I've ever used for reading a text in another language. Since each chapter comes with a quick quiz (I gave up on those quickly, they were less fun and my comprehension was already solid) and a summary. I love the summaries and would often read the previous chapter summaries before I started the next just as a quick review. It's really important to note that this book does a great job of giving you tense switches that feel realistic. Saying "I went to this cool store yesterday, do you want to go with me and then we will eat lunch somewhere else?" sounds easy, but that's three tense switches in one sentence! This book helped me get WAY better at this by having realistic scenarios where the language is used naturally (not like my pal Duolingo.com where all the sentences are isolated). The Cons: I couldn't find a lot as a person who was craving what amounts to "grade level texts" to read. The stories are sometimes silly--but the point is to understand them and get through them--if you want complex, rich literature--you have to read the silly stuff first! There were some words that I had to look up that weren't actually in the glossary at the end of each section--even though they were tough enough (non-high frequency) that I thought they should have been added. But again, when you read the goal should NOT be to understand EVERY word, at first. Basically, if you want a book that will build your confidence as a reader, expose you to the most basic words and phrases in the language, plus give you a bit of a challenge (the last story gave me a workout!), then I think this book is well worth the $15 or so dollars. I totally ate up the book, lol. I will be buying #2 and then the intermediate series before trying my hand at a REAL book. They're worth the money if you want to REALLY learn the language :-)