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Old February 03, 2011, 10:47 PM
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The good thing about Spanish is that it shares a huge amount of vocabulary of English, so you already know *thousands* of words! That is a huge advantage over non-Romance languages. These words tend to be formal, academic, scientific, and technical words. You just have to find the right books and content to read. You'll be on a hundred levels at once. This doesn't happen with most non-Romance languages. With say, Japanese, you start with books for Kindergarteners and then slowly move your way up. Spanish is different. I bet you can already read the Spanish Wikipedia. I can understand quite a bit of it without a dictionary. I can read an entire book on Biology or Chemistry. Almost all the words are the same as in English! Novels are harder to read. I picked up a copy of Harry Potter in Spanish, and could understand almost nothing. If you can't understand something, pick something harder! That sounds weird, but when it comes to Spanish, it's true. Harry Potter is (sort of) a children's book. I then picked up a Mystery (for older people), and because the words were harder (which means the words are the same as English jaja), it was very easy to read. Just go to your local Barnes and Noble or other large bookstores that has a section dedicated to books in Spanish, and pick out several books on a variety of subjects and see how well you can read them. Another thing that will help is actually English etymology and vocabulary classes. The more words that you know in English, the more you know in the Romance languages automatically. Almost all the advanced, pedantic words in English are derived from Latin, and thus will be the same as in Spanish.

So to sum it up, if you want easier content, pick books in Spanish that would be hardest in English to read (besides poetry and old fashioned literature--you won't be able to read those yet at all.) Pick computer books, Science books, math books, how-to books etc. These will counterintuitively be the easiest to read--they will read just like English. All you have to do is read it about 1.5-twice as slowly as you read English, concentrating on each word, thinking of the meaning. If you get the verb tenses and subjunctive wrong at first, that is fine. You'll get it soon enough. The hardest to read will be children's books, besides those at the very rudimentary levels. Books for tweens will also be very difficult to read. Mysteries and such will be much easier to read (but not as easy as technical books), and you should be able to get the gist of them without needing a dictionary. Read them sometimes with a dictionary to learn more vocabulary, and sometimes without. Try several ones until you find one that seems easy to read.
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