Today I want to talk to you about reading in Spanish.  Now you may not have plans for studying the works of Shakespeare in Spanish but being able to read is still an essential skill for a couple of reasons.

First of all when you are in a Spanish speaking country you will need to be able to read things likes signs, menus and instructions that you are bound to encounter as part of your travels.  Secondly your language development will be significantly enhanced if you practice reading in Spanish as often as you can.

So where do you start?

Well you have a number of options open to you such as books, magazines, newspapers and of course the internet.  The best place to start though is to read books aimed at young children (in Spanish of course) because the vocabulary will be straightforward, the ideas will be relatively simple and hopefully there will be pictures to help you get the gist of what is going on.

Then over time, just as you did when you learnt to speak you own language (which I shall assume is English but do forgive me if it isn’t), all you do is start reading longer and more complex books with more and more words. Easy!

Now the beauty of the internet is that there are literally millions of pages for you to read in Spanish and plenty of them are targetted at a young audience - all you have to do is find them.

But what if you feel a little self conscious about reading about stuff you left back in kindergarden?  Well that is a common worry when adults start to learn another language and I make this suggestion.  So here is an alternative.

A good place to start learning to read in another language if children’s books don’t do it for you, is to find information about your favourite hobby or about a subject that you are absolutely fascinated by.  Using the internet you can find pages in Spanish about any subject you care to name.

Here is how you find these pages:

1.   Go to www.wordreference.com and translate your chosen topic.  For example if you were a tennis nut then you would find that the Spanish word for tennis was "tenis".

2.   Then go to the Spanish version of google at www.google.es and do a search for your term (but in Spanish - in our example we would do a search on "tenis").  When you do the search you can choose whether to search the web, pages in Spanish or pages from Spain.  I suggest you choose one of the latter two.  This is particularly important if your chosen topic has the same word in English and Spanish because if you search the web you will get English pages come up and few Spanish ones -  e.g. martial arts terms are often the same because of their foreign roots.

This process will give you thousands if not millions of pages about your chosen topic but in Spanish.  Then all you have to do is read.

Now the key point here is not to try and understand every word at this stage, all you need to do is try and get the gist of each paragraph as you read it.  Over time and with repeated exposure to the language in this form, you will start to absorb the language by osmosis, even words that you don’t fully understand at the time you read them.

I got that last tip from Ben from Notes in Spanish (thanks Ben) and it is a really good accelerated learning principle.

So of you go, start searching, get reading and proficiency in the language will just be around the corner.

See you tomorrow.