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)

Excellent book. I'm a beginner, I felt completely lost at first and had to re-read the first couple a number of times but the more I read the more comfortable it became.I haven't studied past tense yet but already getting the gist of it from reading the stories without having to think too much.I have the audio book version too so after a few reads I listen to the audio and also have a go at reading aloud.Definitely recommend Google translate to be kept on hand. You'll use it less as you go along but there are certainly some words I needed to understand in order to not get completely lost.I'm really enjoying this although do agree the stories are a bit 'strange' in their endings but nevertheless, they are engaging enough.Great book for my needs!

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.

It's a good concept and I have got a lot out of the book. I have one criticism, that is, that the dictionary at the back of the book does not contain most of the words I needed to look up. This is a minor criticism as I could of course use a separate dictionary, but it does seem strange for it not to cover the book's vocabulary.

Great for learning sentence structure and new vocabulary.

After about 30-40 hours of Spanish classes, I found most of this book to be readable (with the help of a dictionary). The stories are simple and easy to follow, and often quite enjoyable. You get a real sense of achievement finishing each story and by the end of the book I'd noticed that my vocabulary had improved. Obviously it's only useful in terms of your Spanish reading ability, but out of all the books I've tried to help me in this area this has been one of the most useful. I would recommend it to any Spanish learners who are looking to improve their reading and vocabulary at their own pace.

I bought this for my daughter who has just done GCSE Spanish. It is a bit easy for her but a nice starter. It has words in bold you can look up Ina glossary and quizzes at the end of chapters so you can check you are understanding it correctly!She is also enjoying the story! A great purchase

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

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.

A good read and I experienced many new words and you have a list of these with an explanation of what there definition is.

La progression est parfaite!Le seul fait de lire des histoires courtes comme celle-ci, nous permet de sortir des méthodes classiques principalement accès sur le dialogue (on peut penser à l'excellente méthode Assimil).Ici, l'approche est bien différente. Il s'agit surtout de nous habituer peu à peu à la formulation littéraire d'une langue.Ce n'est pas une méthode d'apprentissage à part entière (avec ses explications grammaticales traditionnelles), mais bien de courtes histoires, aux tournures de plus en plus complexes, aux vocabulaires de plus en plus fouillés, qui vont nous pousser, sans même nous en rendre compte, à assimiler une écriture livresque, une écriture soutenue.Comme je le disais au début de ce commentaire, la progression est parfaite.

Facile à lire, histoires captivantes, avec liste de vocabulaire et petit résumé après chaque chapitre de 3 à 4 pages.

The stories of the book are sooo interesting. I love the book. After reading two story I immediately bought the second volume of the book. But the volume two is bit more expensive. And now I'm thinking about buying the intermediate level book. But it's also too expensive. But these are really really good books. I Can't find any book like these in the market. Far better than my expectation. If anyone wants to learn Spanish by reading super interesting story, just go for it. 100/100

(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 :-)