The Learning Procedure

[Prison break]

Hello,

So I see people post with a lot of paragraphs full of Spanish words, I have no idea what they are saying, If I look carefully I may find just a few words I may know.

My question is how do you get to that stage to be able to read the paragraphs, as I am a beginner and know some sentences and words in Spanish.

Does it slowly get easier as you learn more words and sentences, as such I'll be able to understand?

[wrholt]

It does get better over time. Knowing more function words (prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns of different types) and how they relate different parts of sentences together will help. Learning to identify which words are verbs and identifying the subject, tense and mood for the particular form of the verb also will help. An example in English:

¿Did you A that B, who C-d the D, E-ed F for G with H on I?

The function words frame the sentence, and give a basic understanding of what's going on, even though you don't know the words for A through I. Common sense can tell you likely meanings for some of them, and possible meanings for the other. As you learn more content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) your ability to get the details will improve, and with it your ability to make better guesses on the rest.

[Julvenzor]

Wrholt's answer is fantastic! I also recomend you learn to identify the diverse functions of the words. As in English, you can find a word working with a totally different meaning in Spanish. For example, a weird case: "valiente".

Es un tipo valiente = He's a brave guy.
¡Valiente estupidez! = What a stupidity!

Cheers!

[jakejake637]

For me, it took about two years of spanish class in 7th and 8th grade to be able to read very many paragraphs. Now, after three years, I can read about 50 words and know at least 40 of them.

But yeah, it probably will just take some time and practice. Of course, you can do it in less than two years like me, it just took me that long because we went slow in our classes. But it you practice every day, you'll get there soon! As the last people said, you can use context clues to figure out words. ¡Buena suerte!