How to learn Spanish by reading

Spanish rewards readers early. Its spelling follows its sounds closely, so once you know a handful of rules you can pronounce almost any word on the page, and much of its vocabulary shares Latin roots with English: decidir, posible, información. It is the first language of people in some twenty countries, and a learner at A2 can already follow a simple story in it.

What takes longer is the grammar that carries a narrative. Spanish tells the past with two tenses that divide the work between them. It uses a subjunctive in the middle of ordinary sentences. It attaches small pronouns to verbs in clusters like dáselo, “give it to him.” A grammar book can explain all of this in a chapter. Reading is how it becomes automatic, because a story shows you each pattern again and again, and the context tells you what it means every time. That is the core of comprehensible input: Stephen Krashen argued that we acquire a language by understanding messages in it (Krashen 1982, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition).

What makes Spanish easy to read, and what doesn’t

Start with the good news. Spanish has five vowel sounds, and a written accent marks every word whose stress falls somewhere unexpected: canción, árbol, médico. Nouns and adjectives agree in gender and number in regular, visible ways. Word order is close enough to English that most sentences can be read from left to right without untangling.

The hard parts, for a reader, are these:

• Two past tenses. The preterite reports completed events: llegó, dijo, se fue. The imperfect paints the background and describes habits: llovía, era, vivía. Every story depends on the contrast. In Llovía cuando llegó el capitán, the rain is the setting and the captain’s arrival is the event.
• Ser and estar. Both mean “to be,” and the choice changes the meaning: es aburrido means he’s boring, está aburrido means he’s bored.
• The subjunctive. It follows verbs of wanting and feeling (quiere que vengas, “he wants you to come”), conjunctions like para que and antes de que, and cuando when the event hasn’t happened yet (cuando llegues, “when you arrive”). In past contexts it becomes the imperfect subjunctive, which has two largely interchangeable forms, tuviera and tuviese; older novels use the -se form more often.
• Pronouns that stack. Se lo dio means “he gave it to him,” or to her, or to them. On its own, se has several jobs, from reflexive to impersonal, and you learn to tell them apart mostly by meeting them in context.
• Dialogue dashes. Spanish novels mark speech with a long dash rather than quotation marks: —Son molinos —dijo Sancho. The second dash opens the narrator’s comment. It reads easily after a few chapters, but at first it’s easy to lose track of who is talking.
• Regional variety. Spain uses vosotros for “you all” where Latin America uses ustedes, and parts of South and Central America use vos for “you.” Everyday words differ too, like coche and carro for “car.” For reading, these differences are small. The written language is largely shared.

Watch for false friends as well: embarazada means pregnant, actual means current, and a librería sells books rather than lending them.

Spanish reading at each level

The CEFR levels describe what you can understand. Here is roughly what they look like in Spanish text. For the general picture, see the levels page and CEFR levels explained.

• A2, elementary. Short sentences, one event at a time. Mostly the present, the preterite and ir a + infinitive for plans. High-frequency words, plus a few story words like tesoro or isla that recur until you know them.
• B1, intermediate. The preterite and imperfect working together, the present perfect, and the present subjunctive in common frames such as quiero que and para que. Sentences link with cuando, porque and aunque, and object pronouns start to come in pairs.
• B2, upper intermediate. The imperfect subjunctive, “if” sentences of every kind (si lo hubiera sabido, “if I had known”), the passive with se, and a wider vocabulary that includes some literary and period words. The tone and suspense of the original come through.
• C1, advanced. Close to the original, lightly condensed: long sentences, irony and a period feel. C2 is the complete novel.

Don Quixote at A2 and at B2

Here is the best-known scene in Spanish literature, the attack on the windmills, at two levels. These examples were written for this page.

A2

Don Quijote vio treinta o cuarenta molinos de viento. Pensó que eran gigantes.

—Son molinos, señor —dijo Sancho.

Pero don Quijote no lo escuchó.

Don Quixote saw thirty or forty windmills. He thought they were giants. “They’re windmills, sir,” said Sancho. But Don Quixote didn’t listen to him.

B2

Al ver los molinos, don Quijote se convenció de que eran gigantes y, sin que Sancho pudiera detenerlo, espoleó a Rocinante y se lanzó contra el primero.

On seeing the windmills, Don Quixote became convinced that they were giants and, before Sancho could stop him, spurred Rocinante on and charged at the first one.

The A2 version uses short sentences, the preterite for what happened (vio, pensó, dijo) and the imperfect for what Don Quixote believed (eran). The B2 version folds the scene into one sentence: an infinitive clause (al ver, “on seeing”), a verb that needs its preposition (convencerse de que), the imperfect subjunctive after sin que, and two vivid verbs of action, espolear (“to spur”) and lanzarse (“to hurl oneself”). Neither version is hard for a reader at that level, which is the whole point.

A daily Spanish reading routine

Twenty to thirty minutes a day does more than a long session on Sunday. A routine that works:

1. Listen as you read. Turn on the narration and follow the text as it’s highlighted, word by word. Spoken Spanish runs vowels together across word boundaries, so va a hacer can sound like a single word; seeing the text while you hear it teaches you where the boundaries are.
2. Reread without audio. Go back over the same pages at your own pace. The second pass is where vocabulary sticks.
3. Look words up sparingly. Tap a word when it blocks the meaning of the sentence, or when you’ve met it three times and still don’t know it. Otherwise guess from context and keep going. Our guide to dictionary or context explains why.
4. Notice the past tenses. Once a week, take one page and ask of each past verb: event or background? It takes a few minutes, and it builds exactly the instinct Spanish narrative needs.

Choosing the right level matters more than any routine. Hu and Nation (2000, “Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension”) estimated that most learners need to know about 98 percent of the words in a fiction text to understand it adequately without help, roughly one unknown word in fifty. If you’re tapping several words in every sentence, drop a level. See the 98% rule, and our guides to extensive reading and reading while listening.

Which classics to read first

• Don Quixote is the great classic of Spanish literature, often called the first modern novel. The original is long and archaic, but at A2 or B1 the famous episodes are a pleasure. Come back to it as you move up; at C2 it’s the complete novel.
• Treasure Island is an ideal first book: a clear plot, unforgettable characters and plenty of dialogue, which is where the dashes and the everyday verbs live.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth has three main characters and a simple shape: down into the earth, and out again. It’s easy to follow at A2.
• The Hound of the Baskervilles suits B1 and B2. Holmes’s deductions and Watson’s reports are full of reported speech (dijo que, le pidió que), and reported requests such as le pidió que viniera bring the subjunctive with them.
• The Count of Monte Cristo is long and gripping, a book to sink into once you’re at B2.

How Lexo helps you read Spanish

Lexo’s Spanish is neutral, written to read naturally in Spain and across Latin America. Every book comes at five levels, and you choose the level book by book: Don Quixote at A2 this year, at B2 the next.

Tap any word and a card shows what it means in that sentence rather than a list of dictionary senses. In Spanish that matters: fue can mean “he went” or “he was,” and se changes its job from one sentence to the next. The card tells you which one you’re looking at, gives the base form and part of speech, explains the phrase or idiom the word belongs to, and translates the whole sentence into English, or into your own language. Words worth keeping go into your Words list.

The whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters, which is a real help when a speaker is marked only by a dash. The text highlights word by word as it’s read, any word can be played on its own, and sentence-by-sentence mode slows a dense passage down to one sentence at a time, with its audio and translation.

If you’re the first reader to ask for a book in Spanish at your level, Lexo writes that edition for you: chapter 1 is ready in a few minutes, the rest follows while you read, and you keep a dated “First edition” mark. Books download to your iPhone or iPad for offline reading, and there’s no account to create.

Learning another Romance language as well? See Portuguese, Italian and French.

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