How to read your first novel in Spanish

Finishing your first real book in Spanish is when the language starts to feel usable. The hard part is picking the right book and keeping going through the first week, when everything feels slow. Here's a plan that works for most learners.

Week 0: pick the right book

Your first book should be short, plain and interesting to you. Fame doesn't matter yet. Don Quijote can wait.

Two good options from the public domain, both marked beginner in Passage:

• Cuentos de la selvaHoracio Quiroga · 1918 · about 18,000 wordsBeginner

  Eight animal stories set in the jungle of northern Argentina, written for children. Each story is short, so you get the feeling of finishing something every few days.

• El capitán VenenoPedro Antonio de Alarcón · 1881 · about 21,000 wordsBeginner

  A short comic novel about a bad-tempered captain who's nursed back to health by a widow and her daughter. More grown-up, still plain, lots of dialogue.

Before you commit, do the page test: read one page from the middle and count the words you'd need to look up. Five or fewer, you're set. More than a dozen, pick something easier. The level guide has the details.

Set a pace you can keep

Decide on minutes per day. Fifteen to twenty minutes a day is enough. Here's the arithmetic, using a deliberately slow pace you can adjust to your own:

• At 80 words a minute, 15 minutes is about 1,200 words.
• Cuentos de la selva at about 18,000 words takes roughly 15 sessions.
• Read five or six days a week and you finish in three weeks, with a spare week for slow days.

Your speed will rise as you go. The first stories are the slowest, because you're learning Quiroga's style and his animals' names along with the Spanish.

Week 1: get used to the rhythm

The first week is the hardest. Expect to stop often, and don't judge the plan by it.

1. Read a paragraph straight through without stopping.
2. Reread it, and mark the sentences you still don't follow.
3. For those, ask about the whole sentence: a translation, the grammar, the key words. In Passage that's one tap.
4. Reread the original once you understand it.
5. Save two or three words that seem useful. That's enough.

The opening of the first story shows what you're up against, and it's friendlier than you might fear:

Notice the switch. The first sentence is all imperfect (había, vivía, estaba, era), setting the scene. The second jumps to the preterite (se enfermó, dijeron) when something happens. The structure that may stop you is solamente yéndose al campo podría curarse, “only by going off to the country could he be cured”: a gerund with a pronoun attached, and a conditional. That's a sentence worth asking about.

Weeks 2 and 3: read more, stop less

By now the common words of the book are familiar: the animals, the jungle, the verbs Quiroga likes. You should be stopping less. A few habits help:

• Guess before you ask. If you're right three times out of four, you're reading at the right level.
• Let some words go. If you understand the sentence without knowing yacaré is a caiman, keep reading. Context will tell you soon enough.
• Review your saved words for five minutes before each session. Seeing them inside their original sentence makes them stick.
• Read one story aloud. Passage's Read Aloud can read any sentence first, so you can hear it.

Week 4: finish, and notice what changed

Finish the book, even if the last story drags. Then go back and reread the first story. It will feel noticeably easier than it did three weeks ago.

What to read next

The natural next steps, in rough order of difficulty:

1. Marianela, Benito Pérez Galdós (1878): a full short novel in plain Spanish, marked beginner.
2. La tía Tula, Miguel de Unamuno (1921): short chapters, clear prose.
3. Lazarillo de Tormes (1554): short and funny, with some old Spanish. Marked intermediate.
4. El sombrero de tres picos, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1874): a comic novella.

The full list, by level, is in the best classic books for Spanish learners, and you can browse every Spanish book in Passage on the Spanish shelf.

The same plan in French or Italian

Everything above works in other languages; only the first book changes. In French, start with Perrault's fairy tales or Jules Renard's Poil de Carotte, and learn to recognise the passé simple early (see the French reading list). In Italian, Pinocchio is the classic first book (see the Italian reading list).

Questions